NSF Announces Funding for Purdue Food, Energy Program
Author: | Brian L. Huchel |
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Magazine Section: | Strategic Growth Initiative |
College or School: | CoE |
Article Type: | Article |
A Purdue University-led program training students to produce sustainable food and electricity for populations through solar energy received a National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Award.
The NSF announced the $2.5 million award in July 2017 for Purdue and Rakesh Agrawal, the program’s principal investigator and Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering. Florida A&M University is partnering on the program.
The award for the collaborative Sustainable Food, Energy and Water Systems project is one of six in the NSF’s research initiative on food, water and energy systems.
Agrawal says the interdisciplinary program aims to meet food, energy and water management needs locally with solar energy. Participants will study complex systems and then develop innovative solutions by combining basic scientific and technical principles from the diverse fields of agriculture, engineering and science.
The program will educate graduate students who will then create solutions to produce food and electricity in a local setting.
Current solar photovoltaics, Agrawal says, block the sun from reaching the ground, creating a “land competition scenario” that makes it difficult to utilize that same land for food planting and electricity cogeneration using photovoltaics.
“What we need is a new design that is not only optimized for electricity production, but also optimized for growing food plants,” he says.
Agrawal noted plants only use a portion of the solar light spectrum for growth, allowing the opportunity to design special solar photovoltaics that allow the necessary light to pass through to the growing plants underneath.
New installation modules and changes in farm practices also will be identified to create a “land cooperation,” Agrawal says.
The five-year traineeship program will include graduate students from an array of areas, including agronomy, agricultural and biological engineering, electrical and computer engineering, chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, chemistry and agricultural economics.
Agrawal says as many as 48 graduate students will be trained in those developed solutions.
The program team is made up of experts from engineering, education and agriculture, including program co-director Mitch Tuinstra, a professor in the Department of Agronomy.
“As we move into a renewable-powered world, the potential competition for land between growing food and energy production is a key constraint to implementation of new technologies,” Tuinstra says. “This traineeship will prepare students to use multidisciplinary approaches to provide creative solutions to the challenge of sustainable food, water and energy production.”
Overall, 17 projects received $51 million in NSF Research Trainee funding.