RenewABILITY Energy

Power in a drainpipe: A business thrives around a
novel device that recovers heat from water
flowing down the drain

RenewABILITY Energy’s CEO Gerald Van Decker with his invention

George Hayden, Jr. lives with his wife and four young children in a 4200-square-foot two-story craftsman traditional house near Mountain Top, PA. When I ventured to their abode in a new upscale wooded development, his wife welcomed me and asked if I wanted coffee. But while that added to the ambience and made me feel at home, this wasn’t a social visit. I was here to check out the plumbing and see a unique energy-saving device known as a Power-Pipe made by RenewABILITY Energy.

“This house was done as energy-efficiently as we could within limits,” Hayden told me as we walked into the mechanical area downstairs. They have a Rinnai Hot Way natural-gas-fired on-demand water heater, also known as a tankless water heater. “This with that makes a big difference,” he says in pointing to the water heater and then the Power-Pipe.

With headquarters and a manufacturing facility in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada), west of Toronto, RenewABILITY Energy has made its mark in so-called drain water heat recovery (DWHR) technology. Made of copper, the Power-Pipe DWHR system is a double-walled heat exchanger that recovers heat energy from the wastewater flowing down your household drain and uses it to warm incoming cold water. They sell it through retailers such as Sears and Home Depot and distributors.

This takes advantage of the fact that nearly one-third of the energy you consume in your home goes to heat water for everyday household tasks, but 90 percent of that energy runs down the drain, mostly in your shower.

 In North America alone, this loss amounts to about $40 billion a year.

Single-family homes as well as multi-unit residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings can take advantage of the Power-Pipe to reduce energy use and water heating costs. Joel Murray, technical support manager at RenewABILITY Energy, reports, “The residential sector has been the major market focus. We have had moderate success with the commercial and industrial sectors. We do some applications for larger more industrial or commercial applications where they manifold several Power-Pipes together.”

The Power-Pipe is based on a principle known as the falling film effect. Water falling through a vertical pipe doesn’t run down the center of the pipe but instead clings to its inside wall, creating a thin film that maximizes the Power-Pipe’s ability to recover heat energy.

Multiple coils of rectangular copper tube wrap together in parallel around a central copper drainpipe. Hot water flowing down the drain transfers its heat to incoming cold water moving up the coils in a counterflow mode. Having multiple coils allows for adequate flow with no discernible water pressure loss. Falling film heat exchangers have actually been around for decades, but previous designs consisted of a single coil wrapped around the drainpipe, restricting flow, or used a non-counterflow design, which reduced heat transfer performance.

The drainpipe and Power-Pipe have the same nominal diameter, with the Power-Pipe installing vertically. Typical residential drainpipes are either 2 or 3 inches in diameter, and the Power-Pipe comes in diameters of 2, 3, 4, and 6 inches. The preferred configuration for providing maximum energy savings plumbs the home's main water line through the Power-Pipe. A second option is to plumb cold water through the Power-Pipe to the water heater only. A third configuration consists of running cold water through the Power-Pipe to the cold side of the shower fixture only.

Accommodates Growing Family
George Hayden built his new house in 2010 to accommodate his growing family and wanted to go with renewable energy as much as possible. It has four bathrooms, three tied into the Power-Pipe in a three-inch drain line downstairs. The outlet from the Power-Pipe feeds to the hot water line upstairs to supplement the water heater. In keeping with the renewable energy theme, they plan to add a 10-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system to the house.

George Hayden installed a Power-Pipe in his new house to save on utility costs.

In their previous house in Hazleton, PA, the Haydens had a traditional electric tank water heater and two showers. Their gas bill runs about $60-70 a month now compared to an electric bill of roughly $100 a month before. The only drawback they notice is a small restriction on the cold water supply going to more than one of the showers because it is being diverted to the Power-Pipe.

RenewABILITY Energy claims that using a Power-Pipe can raise incoming supply water temperature from 50F to 77F and reduce overall household water heating costs by up to 40 percent with a payback of 2 to 6 years. A significant potential for energy and cost savings often comes in industrial applications because of the large volume of heated fluids consumed. The Power-Pipe can recover up to 70 percent of waste fluid heat and use it to preheat fluids before they enter a primary water heater. And institutions can recover up to 60 percent of that wasted heat energy with a Power-Pipe.

Gerald Van Decker invented the Power-Pipe and founded RenewABILITY Energy in 2000 and serves as the company’s CEO. Before that, he worked at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), where he engaged in project management and R&D activities in active solar technologies. Van Decker has a Master's degree in mechanical engineering and Bachelor's degree in systems design engineering, both from the University of Waterloo in Canada. And he is a Professional Engineer registered in the province of Ontario.

RenewABILITY Energy has about 20 employees, including 3 engineers. A mechanical engineer, Joel Murray has worked there five years. “This being a small company, my roles are diverse. I do everything from technical support to designing and sizing systems for larger commercial and industrial applications to process improvements on the technical manufacturing process,” he explains. They custom design Power-Pipes for larger flows and complex plumbing designs, while smaller systems are standard. They do energy recovery analysis to show customers the potential with their hot water. And they design tools to streamline the manufacturing process, which becomes more important as production ramps up.

The company does all the Power-Pipe manufacturing itself. They use copper DWV (drain, waste, and vent) tubing for the inner drainpipe and Type L or Type K copper for the outer coils, silver soldering or brazing the parts. “The main part is wrapping the coils. The rest is brazing the coils into a manifold with a silver phosphorous alloy using an oxyacetylene flame. It’s a very manual process,” Murray says. They purchase the copper tubing in standard round form from a copper mill in the U.S. and form it into its rectangular shape using a proprietary process.

According to Murray, RenewABILITY Energy sells Power-Pipes “all around the world. Since we’re located in Ontario, the biggest market obviously is Ontario. We also sell a good number of units all across Canada and the U.S. We sold some in a couple of different countries in Europe -- Bulgaria, France. Also Mexico. It’s becoming a more well known technology.”

Education Plays a Big Role
But even with this success, the company is still ramping up, and they find themselves in a constant education mode, Murray says. “It’s not a standard technology in the home, so we go around to engineering and architecture firms and designers and offer programs to learn about this technology. While it is a very simple technology, drain water is not something people think about for saving energy. Once they use that water, it flows down the drain and out of sight and mind. We’re there to show them how much energy actually is flowing down the drain.” They’ve developed courses for the American Institute of Architects and the U.S. Green Building Council, and they go to their chapters giving presentations.

Murray adds, “I was involved in designing an enclosed working display where we can create a hot water stream and a cold water stream and actually have one of our units in place that shows how much heat can be picked up.” They take this to trade shows.

Is it fun? “Oh, definitely,” Murray replies. “Especially during the education and design phase where people get that ‘aha’ moment that the potential is there. Green technology is one of the hottest markets right now, and there’s a lot of focus being put on it from many different perspectives.”

It helps that the Power-Pipe qualifies for financial incentives under numerous government and power utility energy efficiency programs. Murray says, “Utilities and energy companies have really backed the technology and offered aggressive rebate programs to their customers. That’s been the biggest surprise. They have programs for homebuilders across Canada and America.” Main examples have been Minnesota Power and utilities in Iowa and California.

Hayden’s Power-Pipe works in conjunction with this gas-powered tankless water heater

George Hayden discovered the Power-Pipe when RenewABILITY Energy rented space in a building in Hazleton that George J. Hayden Electric-Communications worked on. They have their U.S. office there. “I wanted to try their product,” he recalls. Hayden’s plumber followed the directions for installing the Power-Pipe and found it installed easily.

It’s not surprising that Hayden would embrace an energy-saving device considering his company’s direction in recent years. His father George J. Hayden started George J. Hayden Electric-Communications in 1975 as an electrical contracting company serving residential, commercial, and industrial markets. George F. Hayden, the son, serves as vice president of operations. In recent years, the firm has gotten into renewable energy, mainly installing solar PV panels and maintaining the electrical components of wind farms such as substations and transformers – the area around Scranton, PA has seen several wind farms go up in recent years.

With companies like this promoting the Power-Pipe and RenewABILITY Energy engaged in its extensive educating and marketing effort, we may all have a Power-Pipe in our home some day, and drain water will figure prominently in the energy mix.

For more information on the Power-Pipe and RenewABILITY Energy, visitwww.renewability.com

Field Electrical Engineer Needed in York, PA

Progressive Engineer Magazine has posted the following new job opening in its Engineer's Job Market. For more information and listings, visit www.ProgressiveEngineer.com.

Field Electrical Engineer

Graham Engineering Corporation (GEC), a leader in the blow molding industry, has an immediate opening for an experienced, hands-on Field Electrical Engineer at our York, PA location. This position plays a key role in the development of opportunities in retrofits and upgraded controls and the related design, installation, service, and company-wide coordination of building the upgraded controls and retrofit business. This is an excellent growth opportunity for the individual interested in a broad range of responsibilities, including developing business opportunities, backed by a successful and reputable corporation. GEC offers exciting career opportunities to individuals with strong values and a desire to achieve and excel to their fullest potential. We believe an organization is only as strong as the people it employs.

Responsibilities include:

• Keep abreast of overall market trends and identify market segments for which controls upgrades present cost effective sales and service opportunities.
• Analyze competitive technologies and ways in which GEC can produce higher quality and more cost effective retrofits to existing equipment.
• Provide engineering design services and assist in creating conceptual designs and help prepare specifications for new development projects.
• Visit customer sites and evaluate machinery for retrofits and upgrades.
• Write and prepare viable proposals, specifications, estimates and quotes for rebuilds, retrofits and upgrades, including scope and scheduling.
• Create schematics, detail drawings, assemblies, sub-assemblies, BOM’s and layouts, using CAD, and perform required analysis to ensure the satisfaction of all project specifications and needed for the procurement, manufacture and assembly of components.
• Visit customer sites to install retrofits and upgrades. Read, interpret and make changes to control system software installed in customer equipment.
• Provide outside technical support of machinery as needed, including service calls, trouble shooting for retrofit installations.
• Program logical machine functions using an IEC61131 program language and design HMI interface using a combination of visual Basic and canned HMI tools.
• Schedule design reviews with Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering to review progress of design activities and to solicit input and suggestions.
• Assist the assigned Project manager to ensure that all Engineering Documentation for components are released in a timely manner to meet the requirements of the Project Schedule and budget.
• Work with the Sales Department in determining the viability of proposed retrofits to existing equipments.
• Work with Purchasing to develop vendor specifications for out-sourced materials.
• Provide technical support to all departments during procurement, assembly, testing and final acceptance of equipment.
• Assist Technical Documentation Department in the preparation of all drawings, specifications and specific operating procedures required in properly supporting product in the field.
• Work with vendors, consultants and outside resources, as needed.

Job Qualifications include:

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering or equivalent experience.
• Minimum of 2 years machine design experience.
• Proficient use of related computer software, including MS Office and 2D CAD experience.
• Demonstrated understanding of standard machine programming languages including ladder, structured text, function block and some HMI design exposure.
• Effective oral and written communication skills
• Strong understanding of Mechanical and Electrical/control Engineering
• Available to travel 25 – 50% of time.
• Available for customer site evaluations and installations during off hours.
• Physical and medical standards for this position must be met by passing a physical examination by a Company approved physician.

GEC offers its employees a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package. We offer medical, dental, disability and life/accident insurance, flexible spending accounts, 401(k) plan, pension plan, educational assistance, paid holidays and vacation time. For immediate consideration forward your resume tohr@grahamengineering.com.

Progressive Engineer Magazine Announces a New Service

Let Progressive Engineer
Write for Your Organization

By now, hopefully, you’ve read a sampling of articles on our website that show the cool jobs engineers have and the technology they apply. We write these in a style that reveals the personal side of engineers and explains the designs they create in an easy-to-read fashion that laypeople can understand. Progressive Engineer can write a similar article for your organization, one that takes the form of a company profile, a case history on a successful project, or a profile of one of your engineers. You can take advantage of this whether you’re an industrial company, consulting engineering firm, or engineering college.

You might consider engaging us on a long-term basis to write a series of articles for your organization. From a marketing perspective, this will portray you as experts in your field, educate people about your services and capabilities, and serve as an inexpensive form of advertising, especially when compared with print ads in trade magazines.

Either I can visit your company or project site personally and handle the writing, or we can call upon our network of freelance writers around the country and find a writer in your area. In the latter case, the writer would work under our direction in crafting an article that fits our editorial slant.

In this age of social media, your article will reach many venues and wide audiences. For starters, logically enough, it will be posted on our website for viewing like any other story we publish, and it will remain there indefinitely -- several of our articles have stayed online for years and continue to draw many readers. You can set up a link from your website to the story. We will also post it on our Engineering News blog, meaning readers can find it on our Google Blogger site. We post a notice of any new story on our Facebook and Twitter pages. We also post it on our RSS feed, and we can set up an RSS feed from your website using Google’s FeedBurner program. This means anyone that subscribes to your feed will see the article.

If you’re not familiar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, they’re those funny little orange icons you commonly see on websites (some in the business call them chicklets). Essentially, an RSS feed notifies you when information has been added to a website you frequent and sends the information to you to view. You can set this up for any website that offers the feed and for as many websites as you like. It saves you the trouble of searching your favorite websites for any new information added since you last visited.

But there’s more. We can place your article in print trade magazines as well. We handle not only the research, writing, and photography but also working with magazine editors in publishing the articles. I have worked extensively with companies and trade publications in doing this, and some of the stories you see in Progressive Engineer have appeared in print magazines in various forms. Here’s a partial list of magazines I have had articles published in:

• Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration News
• American City & County
• Blue Ridge Regional Business Journal
• College Planning & Management
• Compressed Air
• Construction
• Engineered Systems
• Graduating Engineer
• Heating/Piping/AirConditioning
• Hydraulics & Pneumatics
• IEEE Spectrum
• Mechanical Engineering
• New Hampshire Highways
• NISH Workplace
• Permanent Buildings & Foundations
• Popular Mechanics
• Popular Science
• Power Transmission Design
• Process Heating
• Public Works
• Ski Area Management
• Store Equipment & Design
• Today’s A/C & Refrigeration News
• World Wastes

Engineering firms: As a special bonus, if you hire us to write an article for you, you’ll receive a listing in our Engineering Firm Directory at no extra cost. This is one of the most heavily visited sections of our website. If you already have a paid listing, your next annual fee for that will be deducted from the payment for your article. The same policy applies to engineering schools that want a listing in our Online Engineering Education Programs directory. And any organization that signs on with us will also get to have their news releases posted on our Engineering News blog, another highly visited page on our website. This makes for a complete marketing package.

For more information or to discuss your needs, contact Tom Gibson at 570-713-4812 or tom@progressiveengineer.com. Visit our website at www.ProgressiveEngineer.com.

Green Data Center Showcases Techniques to Reduce Computer Energy Use

Orange Lead the Way

The Syracuse University Green Data Center uses novel techniques such as trigeneration with microturbines and absorption chillers to reduce energy use, creating a model its designers hope to replicate with other data centers as computer energy consumption soars.

By Tom Gibson, P.E.

Cooling towers on the roof give a hint of the operations that take place within the nondescript data center building.

On an overcast February day with snow on the ground and slush on the roads, I turn left and make my way through the South Campus at Syracuse University in upstate New York, about a mile from the main campus. I could’ve turned right for a tour of the main campus and a peek inside the famous Carrier Dome, where the Syracuse Orangemen play football and basketball, but that would have to wait until later. I come to a nondescript, gray, nearly windowless building, and I know I’m at the right place because I see cooling towers on the roof.

This is the new Green Data Center (GDC) at Syracuse, completed in December 2009 and used by the university as its primary computing facility. They design buildings like this to blend in with their surroundings and locate them in innocuous places. But that belies the mission that takes place inside and the unique engineering project behind this groundbreaking building.

Mark Weldon, executive director of corporate relations at Syracuse, greets me at the door and escorts me inside. “This is the greenest data center in the world,” he proclaims. He tells how their previous data center was housed in a 100-year-old building that had become too outdated to continue using.

In explaining how the project came about, Weldon says they partnered with IBM. “We wanted to start something big.” IBM responded by challenging them to design and build a data center that would cut energy use in half, and they gave them two years to do it. “With that timeframe, we couldn’t invent anything new. We put existing technology together in a unique way.” Kevin Noble, manager of engineering at Syracuse University for campus design, planning, and construction, joined us and commented, “This project has been one of the most interesting and complex ones I’ve ever done.”

As the fruit of this effort, the $12.4 million, 12,000-square-foot facility contains specially configured infrastructure space for a power plant, including mechanical and electrical equipment to run the building, and 6,000 square feet of primary raised-floor data center space for computers and servers.

Data centers such as this have taken on added importance with our society’s ever-growing computer use. Roger Schmidt, chief engineer for data center energy efficiency in the Server Group at IBM, states, “Storage has increased by about 69 times over the last decade, and servers have increased by about 10 times. It’s a huge explosion of IT equipment in data centers, and that contributes to a big power increase.” Compared to a typical commercial building, data centers consume 30 times the energy per square foot on average.

The GDC actually came about through a collaboration between Syracuse, IBM, and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Schmidt says IBM had worked with Syracuse for many years, holding meetings with the provost, engineering school, and data center operators. At first it was just about enhancing the old data center by putting in better equipment and best practices. When building a new one entered the picture, IBM donated $5 million in design services and computer equipment, and Syracuse got $2 million from NYSERDA.

Noble and his staff of five engineers guided the project, picking the design team and contractors and helping evaluate different options. One staff engineer, Jim Blum, served as project manager, and another one, Alex Medvedev, a mechanical engineer, served as the commissioning agent.

Fast-Track Design-Build Effort
The project consisted of two parallel design-build efforts that eventually merged. BHP Energy and GEM, Inc. handled design and construction of the power plant portion of the project, which included a trigeneration system and the incoming electrical distribution. Headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, GEM is a large mechanical-electrical construction firm, and BHP Energy is a design firm owned by GEM. BHP is headquartered in Hudson, Ohio, a Toledo suburb, and has offices in Toledo and Saratoga Springs, New York. The data center building itself and architectural design fell under VIP Structures in Syracuse. They retained an MEP (mechanical-electrical-plumbing) engineering firm, Towne Engineering of Utica, New York. Taking this approach, the team actually built the facility in 188 days to meet the deadline.

Dave Blair of BHP Energy explains the operation of the microturbines during a tour of the facility.

In reflecting on that, David Blair, president of BHP Energy and an electrical engineer, says, “It was probably the high point of my career. It was one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever been part of. I’m not a big fan of meetings, but the meetings at Syracuse were something I looked forward to. It was always an exciting experience because you had synergy when you bring a group of people together and you give them a goal of going beyond what’s been done before.”

Venturing into the power plant section of the building, Weldon took me into a room containing the backbone of BHP's integrated power system: 12 Capstone microturbines arranged in two rows of six for electric power generation. He explained that most data centers operate from the electrical grid and have diesel generators for backup power. “We can operate off the grid and use the grid as a backup.”

Gas-powered microturbines generate electrical power and heat for hot water and cooling.

A microturbine is a combustion turbine engine that has come into vogue over the last 10 years for stationary applications as a form of distributed generation. Fueled by natural gas, the 12 microturbines here can generate all the power needed, enabling the data center to operate completely off-grid.

Capstone manufactures microturbines at two facilities in Chatsworth, Calif. and Van Nuys in the Los Angeles area and offers them in 30kW, 65kW, and 200kW sizes. They design and manufacture the electronic equipment, including generators and PLCs (programmable logic controllers) that control their machines. Their microturbines operate on a variety of fuels, including natural gas, biogas, flare gas, diesel, propane, and kerosene.

For this project, Capstone developed a new turbine product in six months, the Hybrid UPS (uninterruptible power supply) based on the C65, which produces 65 kilowatts of electricity. According to Steve Gillette, VP, business development at Capstone, “We can simply run the microturbines when the electric rates are high. It’s really a good match for a data center. We can now save money every day compared to the traditional UPS and backup diesel genset, which only adds value in the case of an infrequent outage.”

One component of Capstone’s microturbine design that makes them viable is an air bearing, which enables the turbine to spin at 96,000 rpm. This has a foil shaped like an airplane wing, and as the shaft starts to rotate, the foil pulls the ambient air in to create a thin film, and then it pushes that foil out slightly, so the shaft floats on air, minimizing friction and eliminating the need for lubrication. (Other turbines like those in jet engines use traditional oil-lubricated bearings because they have to support large mechanical loads.)

But even with this, Weldon points out what he considers the greatest area of energy savings in the data center. “When you get power from a utility, there are transmission losses.” Normally you have to convert high-voltage AC power from the grid to low-voltage DC power for computers. The GDC has its own DC sub-distribution system, with grid power routed through electronics in the microturbines. “Generating our own DC power saves about 10 percent of our energy use.”

Multiple Outputs Boost Efficiency
As good as they sound, microturbines convert only about 30 percent of the fuel energy to electricity, explaining why engineers like to capture the waste heat they generate for use in cogeneration applications to improve efficiency. In this case, they went a step further and employed trigeneration -- combined cooling, heat, and power (CCHP). As a distributor of Capstone turbines, BHP Energy has developed its ReliaFlex Power System, and this marked the first use of CCHP with uninterruptible power. As Gillette remarks, “We can get up to 80 percent total energy conversion efficiency compared to the electric utility grid that’s only 33 percent. You get two or three outputs from one fuel input.”

Driven by waste heat from the microturbines, absorption chillers chill water to cool the servers in the data center.

The 585F exhaust stream from each microturbine is collected in a common duct, and that flows to two heat-recovery modules, one for hot water and another for absorption chillers that make chilled water. These modules use conventional tube-and-shell heat exchangers.

I get to see this as we proceed into a room with the chillers and heat exchangers, where I am treated to a mechanical engineer’s dream full of brightly color-coded pipes and pumps. Two chillers generate 300 tons of cooling, 100 for the data center and 200 for the building next door, a 100,000-square-foot research and office facility known simply as 621 Skytop (its address). The system generates enough cooling that it could be used in warmer climates. Data centers need air conditioning most of the time to cool their computers and data servers. The chillers can chill water to as low as 45F, but currently they’re using 67F water for cooling both the servers in the data center and the space in the building next door.

Absorption refrigerators are a popular alternative to the standard four-stage (compressor, condenser, expansion valve, evaporator) vapor-compression variety where a source of waste heat is available to drive the cooling. The technology has been around since the 1970s. BHP Energy chose Thermax USA double-effect absorption chillers based on favorable experience with them in past projects.

Kevin Noble joined us again and explained just how you get cooling from heat in an absorption chiller. “It’s all magic,” he jokes. I would later pull my old thermodynamics textbook from the shelf to brush up on phase diagrams and refrigeration cycles so I could understand what he said. It seems an absorber, generator, and heat exchanger essentially replace the compressor found in a vapor-compression cycle. The chillers use water as the refrigerant, operating on the principal that water in a vacuum evaporates at low temperature. The vacuum is maintained by circulating a lithium bromide solution that absorbs the vapor from the evaporating water. The waste heat from the microturbine exhaust re-concentrates the solution by releasing the water vapor, which is then re-condensed in the cooling tower on the roof before passing through the expansion valve and on to the evaporator. With no moving parts other than water pumps, these chillers prove reliable and quiet.

Chilled water from the chillers is piped under the floor to racks of servers the size of refrigerators in the data center. Weldon showed me a rear door on a server rack with a heat exchanger in it that looked like a typical radiator coil with fins on it. The servers have fans that blow air horizontally outward through the doors. The cooled air then recirculates to cool the room and ultimately the servers.

Doug Hague, communications technician, peers inside a server cooled by IBM’s Rear Door cooling door.

This is IBM’s Rear Door Heat exchanger cooling door, made by Coolcentric. These remove heat more efficiently than conventional air conditioning. Sensors monitor server temperatures to determine how much cooling each door should provide; the environment can be controlled in each rack of servers.

Exhaust from the microturbines also flows through two Cain heat exchangers in the room with the absorption chillers to produce hot water. Noble says, “Depending on season and load, we can use that hot water to run the perimeter heat in the adjacent building, preheat the outside air used for ventilation, and produce domestic hot water. There are very few heat loads in the data center.”

Mark Weldon shows off batteries that start the microturbines and provide backup power.

Next, we went into a room containing 44 tons of sealed of batteries that augment the turbines. They start the turbines and provide emergency backup power in the unlikely event that all 12 turbines and the utility grid fail to provide enough electricity to maintain operations. The 300-volt battery banks generate at least 17 minutes of full data center power, permitting an orderly shutdown of computers in the event of a calamity.

Automatic Control System Does the Thinking
An automated control system complete with computers and PLCs decides which form of power to use in the GDC. In normal operation, power comes from the electrical grid, and the microturbines act as a current source with their output set to match the thermal requirement imposed by cooling the servers. With the loss of grid power, the microturbines kick on and act as a voltage source with the load setting the current. According to Noble, “With the utility rate structure in our area, it doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to operate the microturbines purely to generate power. You have to be able to use at least a portion of the thermal energy from their exhaust.”

In walking around the data center, Noble notes, “This is a lights-out data center. It has no staff and is typically controlled remotely from someone’s laptop computer.” He adds, “We have extensively instrumented this facility. The ultimate vision is to have it fully automated.”

Indeed, Mark Weldon showed me sensors in power strips along the doorway of a server rack, and the servers themselves have sensors. He estimates they have about 30,000 sensors for measuring temperature, amperage, voltage, and computing capacity (chip load), among other things.

But with all this technology employed in a quest to save energy and increase the efficiency of data centers, one question begs: Did they consider the use of renewable energy? When I posed this question to Noble, he replied, “We are actually considering supplementing our DC power system with solar panels. The adjacent building has a flat roof that’s over 75,000 square feet.”

The GDC is gradually coming online as equipment is being moved into it. Meanwhile, IBM uses the GDC as a showcase and research center for trying new technologies. According to Schmidt, “The idea is to deploy some of these technologies in our clients around the world.” He adds, “We’re working with the mechanical and electrical engineering departments at Syracuse University on software tools that will help our clients design better data centers and help their legacy data centers improve on energy efficiency.”

Hopefully, the creative thinking at the beginning of the project and the hustle to meet a tight deadline will pay off in many ways for years to come. While Syracuse University will benefit from reduced energy use in its computer operations, other data centers will as well as time goes on.

And now for that tour of the main campus and the Carrier Dome...

Don Leo Named Associate Vice President for Research in the National Capital Region

Virginia Tech has named Donald Leo associate vice president for research in the National Capital Region. The announcement was made by Jim Bohland, vice president and executive director of National Capital Region Operations. Leo will be located at the new Virginia Tech Research Center – Arlington and will be responsible for developing and implementing a strategic direction for research throughout the National Capital Region by integrating the university and its community of researchers in the Ballston facility with government agencies as well as private firms in the region.

“Don’s experience and success in developing a research and development ecology with Rolls Royce and other partners through the founding of the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing demonstrates his skills in creating new and exciting collaborations across multiple sectors," Bohland said.

Leo is a professor of mechanical engineering who has been at Virginia Tech since 1998, serving as the associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Engineering from 2007 to 2011. From 2005 to 2007 he was a program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

During his time as associate dean, Leo oversaw several initiatives in research and graduate studies for the College of Engineering. He was the lead at Virginia Tech for creation of the Commonwealth Center for Aerospace Propulsion Systems and the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing as part of a five-year, $14.6 million investment by the state. These funds will be used to support students, faculty, faculty hiring, and the development of new laboratories dedicated to aerospace and manufacturing research.

As associate dean, Leo also instituted several mentoring programs for junior faculty for early career awards, and worked with the departments to develop the first fall recruiting event in the college for prospective graduate students. Research expenditures grew from $107 million to $134 million over the four year period that he was associate dean in the College of Engineering.

His research expertise is the synthesis, modeling, and control of active material systems, with particular interest in the field of electroactive polymers. In 2007 he authored the textbook "Engineering Analysis of Smart Material Systems," published by John Wiley and Sons. He is also the author of more than 200 papers, 80 of which have been published in archival publications.

Leo earned a bachelor of science in aeronautics and astronautics engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and both a master of science degree and a doctor of philosophy in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of Buffalo.

Virginia Tech has fostered a growing partnership with the greater metropolitan Washington, D.C. community since 1969. Today, the university’s presence in the National Capital Region includes graduate programs and research centers in Alexandria, Arlington, Falls Church, Leesburg, Manassas, and Middleburg. In addition to supporting the university’s teaching and research mission, Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region has established collaborations with local and federal agencies, businesses, and other institutions of higher education.

Diane Baxter of GZA GeoEnvironmental Promoted to Senior Project Manager

GZA GeoEnvironmental, an environmental and geotechnical consulting firm, has announced that Diane Baxter, Ph.D., P.E., LEED AP has been promoted to senior project manager at GZA GeoEnvironmental’s Providence, Rhode Island office.

A resident of Cranston, Rhode Island, Baxter joined GZA in 2000 as a geotechnical engineer for a variety of geotechnical, marine, and environmental engineering projects. She has acted as field engineer, project engineer, and project manager and has experience providing foundation recommendations, geotechnical site investigations, construction monitoring, earth support system design, seepage analysis, liquefaction analysis, and slope stability analyses.

Prior to joining GZA, Baxter worked for Metcalf & Eddy in Wakefield, Massachusetts and James K. Mitchell in Blacksburg, Virginia on a variety of geotechnical and environmental consulting projects. Baxter has managed geotechnical aspects of recent projects including Waterplace Luxury Residences, Cape Wind Offshore Wind Farm, Deepwater Wind RI Offshore Wind Farm, RI Hospital Bridge Building, Roger Williams Park Zoo Elephant Barn, and geothermal evaluation for Providence Schools.

Baxter earned a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Tufts University in Massachusetts and a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from Purdue University. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech. She is a registered Professional Engineer in Rhode Island and a LEED Accredited Professional..

Founded in 1964, GZA GeoEnvironmental is a multi-disciplined firm providing environmental consulting, geotechnical and geo-civil engineering, environmental remediation, regulatory compliance, litigation support, air quality, solid waste services, specialty construction, occupational health and safety, and site development services. GZA maintains corporate offices in Norwood, Massachusetts, and the firm has 550 employees and operates 24 offices in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes Regions. For additional information, visit www.gza.com.

Engineer Receives Honor Reaching out to Children

For more than 20 years, structural engineer Bob Johnson of Chicago has presented lectures on engineering to children and students in a host of outreach programs. Johnson's lectures feature interactive displays and presentations that are fun and educational and designed to enhance children’s interest in math, science, and, of course, engineering.

These efforts caught the attention of Water Reclamation District Commissioner Frank Avila, who recently presented an award to Johnson for his efforts, “In recognition of exceptional Leadership in educating our children in K-12 in Engineering.” The award was presented by Commissioner Avila during taping of a television program (CAN-TV) with Johnson. The program aired on Chicago Cable TV in late June and will be available via the Internet.

According to Avila, Johnson’s structural engineering models and ‘toys’ provide an enriching hands-on practical application of structural engineering principles. His building and bridge models provide students and adults insight into their designs.