Our second significant accomplishment was that we developed methods of addressing and removing image artifacts on a very large number of images, allowing extraction of the porespace for analysis. All FIB-milled samples of heterogeneous samples have artifacts resulting from imperfect beam shape and the nature of sample heterogeneities, and these have previously hindered extraction of porespace. Third, we successfully simulated single-phase flow through the identified and discretized porespace from one of our largest image sets and are processing our largest image set for flow simulation. The overarching aim of the proposed research is to improve understanding of the degree to which ecological and land management processes influence the physical Earth system and feedback to climate change. The specific goals of the current proposal are aimed at evaluating and improving models of land-atmosphere interactions and climate change field experiments intended to reveal ecosystem responses to climate change. Land surface models are used to represent the properties of vegetation and soils that influence weather and climate through their effects on energy, water and greenhouse gas fluxes. Until recently, land management and cropping systems have not been represented well by these models even though crop growth and management practices have potentially large impacts on many aspects of weather and climate. We are using ground based and satellite observations, including from the ARM site and Ameriflux network towers in agricultural regions to validate and improve a coupled atmosphere-land surface model, WRF-CLM. Such model improvements will improve predictions of weather and climate in agricultural regions,hydroponic nft and in regions undergoing changing land management.

Initial efforts focused on biogeophysics have laid the groundwork for evaluation and improvement of modeled biogeochemistry. Climate change experiments are used to quantify vegetation responses to altered climate states, and mechanisms underlying the responses. Infrared heating is increasingly used to manipulate temperatures. This method has rarely been evaluated in terms of its effects on winter and early spring conditions, nor have comparisons been drawn across multiple sites with the same treatment implementation. We are using data from existing experiments in the Rocky Mountains to examine snowpack and soil responses to the climate manipulations. A key accomplishment in FY14 has been submission of papers describing a regional climate-land surface model that includes dynamic crop growth and irrigation, and its application to assess effects of irrigation decline on heat waves in agricultural regions. The first paper is still in review at Climate Dynamics, while the second was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters and is in revision for Environmental Research Letters. Another analysis was completed to evaluate how irrigation influences land-atmosphere coupling strength. This analysis was presented at the AGU Fall Meeting in December 2014 and is in preparation for a journal submission in FY15. Further progress was made in spinning up an offline version of CLM with crops in the Southern Great Plains – a complex agricultural region with intensive observations. With Noah Molotch we revised and submitted a manuscript for publication describing the effects of experimental heating on snow accumulation and melt, and comparing this to a similar site further south and to a snow pack model. The paper was recently accepted for publication pending minor revision at Forest and Agricultural Meteorology. We also conducted initial analysis of gap-filled microclimate data from multiple warming experiments for two separate papers; one focused on the relationship between spatial variance in soil temperature and the mean over the growing season, and another describing heating effects on soil microclimate. The first analysis was presented in a poster by PhD candidate Danielle Christiansen at the MtnClim meeting in Utah in October 2014.

The second was included in invited talks at Utah State and Penn State Universities in 2014. The purpose of this project is to observe—in situ, and over a range of length- and timescales—how changes in chemical conditions affect the conformation and reactivity of natural organic matter relevant to both soil and shale systems. We believe an ambitious but attainable goal will be to explore such chemistry at the smallest relevant scales, from NOM aggregates and ultimately to single macromolecules. Natural organic matter is a complex mixture of organic molecules and associated metals and is ubiquitous in the near earth surface environment. In the form of soil organic matter and dissolved organic matter, NOM chemistry impacts practically every meaningful ecological process in soils, sediments, ground waters, surface waters, and marine systems. This reduced carbon is important on a mass basis for global carbon cycling, and its’ long-term fate is a major outstanding question for predicting the feed backs associated with global climate change. As kerogens in sedimentary rocks, NOM chemistry plays a key role in energy production capacity, efficiency and associated environmental impacts. A core approach in this project is the application of recent technical developments from the Schuck group in surface-enhanced and tip-enhanced Raman scattering for nanoscale analysis.Raman scattering was chosen as the central analytical technique because it has good sensitivity to organic matter composition and compatibility with aqueous environments. We will also plan to take advantage of the technique of nano-FTIR spectroscopy and X-ray ptychography to explore the nano-scale structure of organic matter in natural shales. The results are highly complementary to information obtained by electron and X-ray imaging and spectroscopy.

Our most significant accomplishment to date has been to show that the naturally occurring iron oxide, magnetite, can be used as a SERS substrate to probe the interaction of organic molecules with natural mineral surfaces. We believe this development is the first demonstration of SERS behavior in a natural metal oxide and will be broadly useful to the study of NOM dynamics. A manuscript on these results has been prepared by Namhey Lee and is currently under review at Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. We have also collected preliminary ptychography data on a natural shale sample. While data processing is still underway, we believe that this too is a world unique measurement and will have important implications for our understanding of the nano-scale structure of shale materials. Urban farm systems are a dynamic assembly of interdependent systems , but there is a fundamental lack of an understanding of how these systems work independently and as a group. Consequently there is only a vague understanding of how commercially and environmentally sustainable urban farming systems can be designed and operated. While there are many innovations around the country in each of the areas described above, for urban farming efforts to be replicable, scalable and cost effective, rigorous scientific knowledge needs to inform their design and implementation. To have impact at scale, technology needs to be developed and tested in partnership with those who would be the on-theground urban farmers. We propose a partnership with three cities: Oakland, CA; Toledo, OH; Chicago, IL. The goal would be to develop a rich relationship with existing urban agricultural efforts already going on in these cities and use these relationships to inform ongoing development decisions; test and fine tune new technologies as they are developed, and understand the implementation framework that will support adoption of proposed technologies. Specific tasks that would be conducted in partnership with these places would include: Initial scan of existing urban agriculture efforts and assets: Each of the proposed cities already has existing urban agricultural efforts. Understanding the scope and scale of these efforts, the innovations that are already being put into play,hydroponic channel and the challenges and barriers being experienced will be an important grounding for this work. Creation and regular engagement of a partner’s group in each city. We propose in each city to create a partner’s group which would include between 8 to 10 groups involved in urban agricultural efforts. Quarterly meetings with these partner groups would inform larger project decision-making. Testing of new urban agriculture methods, strategies or tools: As the work evolved these partner groups would serve as the on-the-ground testers of new technologies. Although CO2 has been used as an injection fluid for enhanced oil recovery for decades, CO2-EOR remains inefficient. The primary limitation of CO2-EOR effectiveness has been the low viscosity and high mobility of CO2 that results in injected CO2 bypassing oil resulting limited displacement efficiency. After decades of extensive research and practice on ways to reduce CO2 mobility, the CO2-bearing foam approach seems more promising. A variety of surfactants have been designed for generating foams, however, their commercial applications are still lacking. The major barriers limiting industrial applications of CO2 foam-EOR include the high costs of surfactants, compare to the price of oil. Concerns over environment impacts also exist for some of these surfactants. If a CO2-compatible surfactant that overcomes these limitations can be identified, such a discovery will benefit oil recovery, while at the same time increase the incentive to implement carbon capture and increase the capacity of geologic carbon sequestration in depleted oil reservoirs. The overall objective of this project is to develop a new and unconventional material, which is less expensive, non-toxic and highly effective as a substitute of conventional synthetic surfactants, for increasing CO2 viscosity and control its mobility in EOR. The Earth’s near surface sediments contain deposits of natural organic matter produced primarily from degradation of plants.

We hypothesize that these organic deposits contain a large fraction of surfactant-like material. This material can be extracted, and dispersed in the form of nanoparticulates when re-dissolved in water. These nano-particulates can stabilize supercritical CO2- brine foams, and are more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than synthetic surfactants currently used in CO2 foam-EOR. Our most significant accomplishment has been to identify the sources of NSS , and all has been successfully tested as source materials for NSS extraction . We have developed a method to produce the NBS. The NBS is capable of generating and stabilizing dense scCO2-in-water foams containing CO2 at up to 80 volume% with controllable effective viscosities up to 40 cP, three orders of magnitude higher than that of pure CO2 at the same pressure and temperature. We measured interfacial tension of NSS liquid solutions paired with N2, and paired with scCO2 as function of NSS solution concentrations. The NBS performs as an effective surfactant, significantly reducing interfacial tensions between the N2-water and the supercritical CO2- water interfaces. We have also just built a modified high pressure and high temerature foam generator and successfully tested foam-stability vs. temperature. The NSS is a N2- and CO2- compatible and high quality surfactant. We are in the process of optimizing NSS extraction method, estimating extraction costs, and optimizing laboratory CO2-EOR tests in cores. The purpose of this project is to develop a small suite of highly energy-efficient and low-cost medical devices, in order to enable affordable healthcare in rural Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The specific devices developed as a part of this—identified in LIGTT’s “50 Breakthroughs” study—include an infant warmer , and continuing development of a portable solar-powered vaccine refrigerator . For the infant warmer, the key technical questions that needed to be overcome were the choice of a safe, low-cost phase change material which could maintain the appropriate temperature for more about 6 hours; a low-cost, comfortable , safe and sturdy external material; and an overall system design. For the vaccine refrigerator, the key technical question was the appropriateness of thermoelectric materials to effectively and efficiently transfer heat away from the vaccine chambers. Early-stage, conceptual architectural design has suffered radical changes in recent years, due to development on powerful modeling tools that allow fast, parametric modeling of complex building geometries, rapid-prototyping of 3D models, and links to diverse performance simulation tools. As parametric design progressively becomes the preferred method for early-stage conceptual design, the use of Generative Design Methods represents the next step in this process, by introducing performance-based optimization into architectural design, namely in terms of low-energy design. As proofs of concept, this project explored the implementation of Generative Design Methods for optimization at multiple design scales, namely: 1) Design optimization and prototyping of a light redirecting system; main research questions addressed were: a) Currently available methods/tools to use in generative design optimization; b) Reliability and error margins introduced by these methods; c) obstacles for more accurate methods; 2) Whole-building early stage design, for multi-criteria lighting, heating and cooling energy optimization. Light Redirecting System: The system simulated was built in light-weight aluminum, with a 3M high reflectance film applied on top of louvers , and a lower face coated in 70% light reflectance white mate paint, to reduce glare to occupants.