Controlled environment agriculture methods like hydroponics allow for the growth of crops indoors, providing a stable and controlled conditions for year-round food production, even in urban areas. Despite the high level of control, the growth of microbes can be difficult to control and threatens crop viability. Biofilms develop on system surfaces, and can harbor pathogens harmful to plant or human health.

In this project, biofilm development will be investigated in piped systems using flow cytommetry, imaging, and molecular biology methods. Students will grow plants with hydroponics systems and investigate the factors that control biofilm growth. Since biofilms can develop similarly in any piped system, students will also operate a variety of piped systems with controlled conditions. Students will learn a variety of environmental characterization methods and design and develop controlled experiments.

Biological Characterization and Imaging, Cellular Biology, Ecology and Sustainability, Engineering the Built Environment

• No Major Restriction

While no background is required, a student with biology and/or biology lab experience and background is preferred.

Environmental and Ecological Engineering

Caitlin Proctor

Our project is funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and involves an interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers, chemists, and psychologists at Purdue University and New York University (NYU). We will elucidate determinants of indoor dust ingestion in 6- to 24-month-old infants (age range for major postural and locomotor milestones). Specific objectives are to test: (1) whether the frequency and characteristics of indoor dust and non-dust mouthing events change with age and motor development stage for different micro-environments; (2) how home characteristics and demographic factors affect indoor dust mass loading and dust toxicant concentration; (3) how dust transfer between surfaces is influenced by dust properties, surface features, and contact dynamics; and (4) contributions of developmental, behavioral, and socio-environmental factors to dust and toxicant-resolved dust ingestion rates. In addition, the project will (5) create a shared corpus of video, dust, toxicant, and ingestion rate data to increase scientific transparency and speed progress through data reuse by the broader exposure science community.

Our transdisciplinary work will involve: (1) parent report questionnaires and detailed video coding of home observations of infant mouthing and hand-to-floor/object behaviors; (2) physical and chemical analyses of indoor dust collected through home visits and a citizen-science campaign; (3) surface-to-surface dust transfer experiments with a robotic platform; (4) dust mass balance modeling to determine distributions in and determinants of dust and toxicant-resolved dust ingestion rates; and (5) open sharing of curated research videos and processed data in the Databrary digital library and a public website with geographic and behavioral information for participating families.

The project will provide improved estimates of indoor dust ingestion rates in pre-sitting to independently walking infants and characterize inter-individual variability based on infant age, developmental stage, home environment, and parent behaviors. Dust transport experiments and modeling will provide new mechanistic insights into the factors that affect the migration of dust from the floor to mouthed objects to an infant’s mouth. The shared corpus will enable data reuse to inform future research on how dust ingestion contributes to infants’ total exposure to environmental toxicants.

U.S. EPA project overview: https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract_id/11194

Biological Characterization and Imaging, Ecology and Sustainability, Engineering the Built Environment, Environmental Characterization, Human Factors

• No Major Restriction

We are seeking students passionate about studying environmental contaminants and infant exposure to chemicals in the indoor environment. Preferred skills: experience with MATLAB, Python, or R. Coursework: environmental science and chemistry, microbiology, physics, thermodynamics, heat/mass transfer, fluid mechanics, developmental psychology.

Lyles School of Civil Engineering

Brandon Boor

The objective of this project is to utilize state-of-the-art proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) to evaluate emissions and exposures of volatile chemicals in buildings. My group is investigating volatile chemical emissions from consumer and personal care products, disinfectants and cleaning agents, and building and construction materials. You will assist graduate students with full-scale experiments with our PTR-MS in our new Purdue zEDGE Tiny House and process and analyze indoor air data in MATLAB.

Big Data/Machine Learning, Ecology and Sustainability, Energy and Environment, Engineering the Built Environment, Environmental Characterization

• No Major Restriction

Preferred skills: experience with MATLAB, Python, or R. Coursework: environmental science and chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, heat/mass transfer, and fluid mechanics.

Lyles School of Civil Engineering

Nusrat Jung

Quench media are typically paraffinic oils, molten salts, or aqueous polymer-based fluids, depending on the quench speed and bath temperature needed. While beneficial, unfortunately, they have downsides that limit use. Paraffinic oils are petroleum derived which will become more problematic from a cost and regulatory perspective moving forward and generally do not have good high temperature stability. Salt baths work at high temperatures and are not petroleum-derived, but toxicity can be a concern. As always, corrosion can be problematic with any fluid. To solve these issues, others have researched natural oils as alternatives, such as vegetable oils from various sources. Unfortunately, oils are impure, heterogeneous, vary from source to source (and year to year), and most importantly, have residual double bonds and triglyceride esters that make them reactive. On the positive side, they are biobased, renewable, biodegradable, non-toxic and have relatively high flash points.
We propose to explore new quench oils specifically to replace salt baths in austempering applications. Salt baths pose sustainability and disposal issues, but austempering requires temperatures in excess of what most oils can bear. Ideally, we will identify quench oils with flash points up to 400 ºC, high heat capacities, high thermal conductivities, and that are non-corrosive. We will investigate natural oils and modern advanced oils (e.g. silicone, phosphate esters) as replacements using quench tests, thermal analysis and flash point measurement. This project is joint with Prof. Titus of MSE.

Ecology and Sustainability, Material Processing and Characterization

• No Major Restriction

none

MSE

Jeffrey Youngblood

Plastics are ubiquitous in many facets of our lives, and the plastics industry is the third-largest manufacturing sector in the United States. But as plastics production develops rapidly, the long-term environmental challenges are globally recognized. Chemically resistant plastic products have extremely long lifetimes before completely decomposing — a single-use coffee pod can last 500 years in a landfill. Plastic waste accumulation has led to pollution that affects land, waterways and oceans; organisms are being harmed by entanglement or ingestion.

Closed-loop circular utilization of plastics is of manifold significance, yet energy-intensive and poorly selective scission of the ubiquitous carbon-carbon (C-C) bonds in contemporary commercial polymers pose tremendous challenges to envisioned recycling and upcycling scenarios. Our group focuses on a unique topochemical approach for creating elongated C-C bonds with a bond length of 1.57~1.63 Å (in contrast to conventional bonds with a C-C bond length of ~1.54 Å) between repeating units in the solid state with decreased bond dissociation energies. These polymers with elongated and weakened C-C bonds exhibit rapid depolymerization within a desirable temperature range (e.g., 140~260 °C), while otherwise remaining remarkably stable under harsh conditions.

Students will get involved in the following research activities:

1. Synthesis of novel polymer single crystals via topochemical approach
2. Synthesis of polymers with elongated and weakened C-C bonds for circular utilization
3. Processing, characterization, and practical application of chemically recyclable (depolymerizable) polymer single crystals and polyolefin materials.

Chemical Catalysis and Synthesis, Ecology and Sustainability, Energy and Environment, Material Processing and Characterization

• No Major Restriction

Davidson School of Chemical Engineering

Letian Dou

The aim of this project is to develop FS-free FFF formulations that meet specifications by combining new siloxane-based surfactants with controlled release of additives. The objective here is to develop the chemistry and methodology to encapsulate foam formulation additives with “smart” temperature release capabilities with the goal of minimizing foam degradation. The lifespan of firefighting foams is typically increased via the addition of viscosifiers such as polysaccharides to reduce foam drainage, but the increase in viscosity can impede foam spreading. In this objective, we aim to solve these issues by encapsulating the viscosifiers into temperature releasing polymer matrices. We hypothesize that (hypothesis 1) viscosifiers can be successfully encapsulated in temperature-sensitive microcapsules and (hypothesis 2) the viscosifiers can be released during fire-fighting operations increasing foam viscosity and reducing foam degradation without impacting foam generation and spreading. This project is joint with Prof. Carlos Martinez and he will co-advise.

Ecology and Sustainability, Material Processing and Characterization

• Materials Engineering
• Chemical Engineering
• Chemistry

no experience necessary. Just thinking about about doing research as a career as a PhD.

School of Materials Engineering

Jeffrey Youngblood