From Wood to Wheels
By Jennifer Donovan
Tech Tackles Sustainable Transportation
Chung-Jui Tsai (right), director of the Biotechnology Research Center, and her undergraduate research assistant, Stephanie Drake, examine samples in the plant culture room.
David Shonnard doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel; he wants our wheels to transport us in a cleaner, greener way.
In a research enterprise called Wood-to-Wheels, chemical engineering professor Shonnard and colleagues from disciplines as disparate as forest resources and social sciences are pooling their expertise to solve a multi-faceted puzzle—how to create a renewable source of clean-burning, energy-efficient, and cost-effective fuel using local resources.
Their research focuses on a resource that’s plentiful throughout the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—trees. “It just makes sense to find regional solutions to global problems,” says Shonnard.
Lately, America has turned to corn ethanol in its search for solutions to pressing twin problems: dependence on imported oil and greenhouse gases produced by petroleum-based fuels. But corn ethanol brings its own set of problems. It is expensive to make; it depletes corn supplies in a hungry world; and its greenhouse gas emissions are no easier on the environment.
So, thought Michigan Tech scientists, let’s see if we can produce a better biofuel, using something from our own backyard, and build an engine that uses it more efficiently. In 2005, with a $1.7-million grant from the National Science Foundation and support from the auto, heavy equipment, and chemical-processing industries, they began to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.
The researchers recently applied for another $30 million from the NSF to establish a Wood-to-Wheels Engineering Research Center involving five universities in four states, led by Michigan Tech.
ME-EM Associate Professor Jeff Naber (center) works with graduate students Jaclyn Nesbitt and Ben Moscherosch on a diesel engine in the Advanced Internal Combustion Engines Lab.
Before the Wood-to-Wheels researchers could even think about building cars that run cleanly and efficiently on ethanol made from wood, they needed the right kind of wood—more technically, “woody biomass.” That can be trees, certain grasses, or the leavings of lumbering.
“Forest residues on the Upper Peninsula could meet 75 percent of our transportation fuel needs in the UP alone,” says John Sutherland, professor of mechanical engineering and director of Michigan Tech’s Sustainable Futures Institute, which sponsors Wood-to-Wheels.
Forestry professor Chung-Jui Tsai tackled the task of helping trees become better ethanol factories. A molecular biologist, Tsai is working to grow trees with cell walls that are easier to break down; healthier trees that grow faster and handle environmental stress better.
“Trees can’t run away when they are attacked or go grab a sandwich when they are hungry,” Tsai points out. But she and her team can help them survive and thrive by identifying the genes for more-desirable traits and breeding healthier, hardier, faster-growing trees.
Forest resources professor Ann Maclean and her students are working on another piece of the puzzle, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to determine where the most plentiful woody plants of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are located.
Shonnard and his team are researching new and better ways to turn that woody material into ethanol for fuel, while Associate Professor Jeff Naber and his mechanical engineering students are designing new engines to burn that ethanol more efficiently with less-toxic emissions.
Meanwhile, Sutherland and his postdoctoral associate, Vishesh Kumar, are addressing harvesting, handling, and transportation issues. And Kathy Halvorsen, an associate professor in the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science as well as the Department of Social Sciences, is working with environmental policy professor Barry Solomon to study public perceptions of the connection between global warming and petroleum-based fuels and how that affects public policy.
“Most people believe that climate change is happening, but they don’t know why,” Halvorsen explains. “It doesn’t matter how much Chung-Jui [Tsai] improves the trees or what Dave [Shonnard] learns about producing better biofuels or what new and better engine Jeff [Naber] designs, if we don’t have federal and state policies to support implementing their technology. And if the public doesn’t know that burning fossil fuel is causing climate change, how are they going to support good public policy to reduce the risk?”
ME-EM graduate students Abhijeet Nande (left) and Yeliana Yeliana work with Associate Professor Jeff Naber on a single cylinder alternative fuels engine.
Wood-to-Wheels is a perfect example of what Michigan Tech does best. As a graduate “Enterprise,” the program transforms student research into a businesslike operation with corporate sponsors and specific deliverables. It’s the first graduate-student version of the nationally recognized undergraduate Enterprise Program pioneered at Michigan Tech, which gives students not only technical skills, but experience solving practical problems the way business and industry do.
The multidisciplinary approach is also a Michigan Tech hallmark.
Shonnard’s bioprocessing initiative, for example, involves biochemistry—developing treatments to break down the tough cell walls and using naturally occurring enzymes from fungi to partially decompose wood chips into the sugars that are then fermented to produce ethanol. It also incorporates genetics, as the researchers analyze the genes that enable the enzymes to do their job.
And physics plays a role; a faculty physicist contributed a model of the molecular structure of the enzyme to predict its shape and activity. Using that model and genetic data, Shonnard and graduate students Michael-Brodeur Campbell and Jill Jensen may be able to create engineered enzymes to do the job even better.
With the ethanol that Shonnard’s lab produces, Naber and his team are working to develop an ethanol engine that will start cleanly and produce very low emissions. Graduate student Christopher Cooney’s goal is to improve combustion efficiency by 30 percent, which would make it comparable to gasoline.
Mechanical engineering graduate student Jaclyn Nesbitt and undergraduate JoAnn Klobucher are building a pressure-vessel laboratory to study the pressures and temperatures that occur in an internal combustion engine under a variety of conditions, comparing ethanol and gasoline operation.
David Shonnard, professor of chemical engineering, undergraduate Adam Mix, and graduate student Juan Morinelly monitor a reactor that converts woody biomass into fermentable sugars, the first step in the process of making ethanol.
Another graduate student, Brandon Rouse, is examining combustion in a single-cylinder research engine provided by General Motors. And Yeliana Yeliana, a mechanical engineering graduate student and Fulbright scholar, is creating computer models and simulations of ethanol engines, to help the design team optimize the next generation of biofuel engines.
Peg Gale, dean of the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, calls Wood-to-Wheels “a new science of integration, bringing together all the expertise in so many different areas.” And, Gale adds, “it’s just what our students need, in a world where more and more engineers have to think about the ecosystem, and more and more forestry graduates must apply engineering solutions to natural resources problems.”
The students aren’t the only ones benefiting from the cross-disciplinary focus of Wood-to-Wheels. “It’s been a very stimulating learning environment for faculty and students,” says Shonnard. Adds Maclean: “When we started out, we didn’t speak the same language. The faculty have done a good job of educating each other, and that’s important, because the environment is a complex puzzle that one discipline alone can’t understand.”
More information is available at www.sfi.mtu.edu/w2w/.