CREATE Monthly PI Seminar Series (May 2018)
Event Date: 04 May 2018 03:00 AM - 04 May 2018 05:00 AM
Event Venue: Perseverance Room at Innovation Wing Level 5
Date: Friday 4 May 2018
Time: 11 am
Venue: Perseverance Room
L5 Innovation Wing, NUS University Town
(No registration required)
Prof Jongyoon Han from SMART BioSyM will give the talk “Engineering of Electrical Desalination Processes for Brine Management” while Prof Chris Zegras from SMART FM will be speaking on “Urban Systems Modeling: SimMobility’s Integrated Microsimulation Approach.”
Engineering of Electrical Desalination Processes for Brine Management
Prof Jongyoon Han
Economically treating brine waste (TDS higher than 40k ppm) is increasingly important task in desalination, due to a large volume of brine waste resulting from shale developments and existing desalination plants. Yet, conventional desalination technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO) are not practical to process brine salinity, while distillation methods incur substantial water cost for complete desalination of brine waste. In this presentation, I will discuss systematic, model-based engineering methodologies for developing and optimizing novel electrical desalination process we developed, called Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP) process.
At the heart of our idea is the concept of managing brine by partial desalination (reducing brine salinity below ~ 30k ppm), for which electrical desalination processes are ideally and uniquely suitable. This is meaningful since 1) partially treated brine with salinity lowered to 10 ~ 20k ppm can often be reused or discharged environmental impact, and 2) there are many technological options (e.g. RO) once salinity of brine waste is reduced to below seawater salinity (~35k ppm). In this paper, we present our effort to optimize ion concentration polarization (ICP) desalination for the partial desalination of brine (70k ppm). As a result of significant scale-up engineering of ICP desalination, we demonstrate high-throughput (100ml/min) ICP desalination prototype to produce diluate output (35k ppm) from brine feed (70k ppm) via ICP desalination process which incrementally remove salts in an optimized manner to achieve lowest cost of treatment. We evaluate economic feasibility of ICP desalination for brine partial desalination by in-depth cost analysis, and compare with other available options.
About the speaker
Professor Jongyoon Han is the principal investigator of Micro/Nanofluidic BioMEMS Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT. He received a B.S. and a M.S. degree from the Department of Physics of Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. Han received his PhD from the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University. Before joining BE, Professor Han was a research scientist at Sandia National Laboratories where he studied protein microfluidic separation systems.
Urban Systems Modeling: SimMobility’s Integrated Microsimulation Approach
Prof Chris Zegras
Among the relevant policy areas for effectively managing metropolitan growth, coordination of metropolitan land use and transportation planning has long been recognized as important. The spatial distribution of people, places, and firms determines the demand for mobility while mobility infrastructure and services influence the relative desirability of different places and, thus, the physical growth of the city. Today, a convergence of factors makes integrated urban systems models, capable of representing these interactions, highly relevant to decision-making and, potentially, more feasible in practice. This talk describes recent efforts at SMART FM to develop a functionally integrated microsimulation model: SimMobility. SimMobility integrates the land use, activity and mobility systems across three time frames, roughly consistent with agents’ decision-making: short-term, e.g., driver lane-changing behaviour on streets; medium-term, e.g., individual activity and mode choices; and long-term, e.g., household vehicle ownership and housing choices. This paper focuses on the integration of the long-term and medium term models, describing the modelling framework, presenting recent model estimation results, and providing examples from simulation applications. It concludes with a description of ongoing research needs.
About the speaker
Chris Zegras is Associate Professor of Transportation and Urban Planning at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) where he also serves as Associate Department Head. He teaches, leads large-scale research, and consults on a range of topics, from data collection to behavioral analysis, integrated land use transportation planning and modeling, and project and policy analysis. He is Lead Principal Investigator for the Future Urban Mobility (FM) Interdisciplinary Research Group under the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). He is also an Executive Board member of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Centre of Excellence. At MIT, he leads the Mobility Futures Collaborative, a research group that leverages analog and digital data collection and analysis tools to mobilize a collective intelligence towards improved mobility conditions in a range of contexts around the world. Before becoming a faculty member at DUSP, he worked at MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment and the International Institute for Energy Conservation. He holds a BA in Economics and Spanish from Tufts University and a Master in City Planning, Master of Science in Transportation, and PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT.