Brook Byers Professors Appointed

Brook Byers Professors Bras, Brown and Reichmanis

In January 2014, three distinguished faculty were named Brook Byers Professors:  Bert Bras (Mechanical Engineering), Marilyn Brown (Public Policy), and Elsa Reichmanis (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering). Made possible by a gift from Shawn and Brook Byers, a 1968 Georgia Tech alumnus in Electrical Engineering, the Brook Byers Professorships provide resources to enable and enhance cross-disciplinary, collaborative research and education in sustainability, energy, and water. Recommended by their peers, the three recipients were chosen by the Provost and approved by the Board of Regents. The appointments recognize superior scholarly achievement and the potential for further progress. The Brook Byers Professorship is the highest title bestowed at Georgia Tech for those specifically engaged in sustainability related research and education.

Bert Bras is the director of Sustainable Design and Manufacturing group and a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Professor Bras excels at taking a systems view of sustainability problems resulting in novel and innovative opportunities that yield environmental as well as economic benefits. Funded by government agencies as well as major industry partners, his recent collaboration with Ford Motor Company resulted in Ford’s MyEnergi Lifestyle® campaign and the Ford C-Max Solar Energi concept car. As a Brook Byers Professor, Bras intends to expand his collaborative work with other faculty and students on campus. In particular he plans to expand and integrate his work in biologically-inspired design, energy systems, vehicle electrification, and personal mobility.

As a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy and member of the Board of Directors of the Tennessee ValleyAuthority, Marilyn Brown is a leading expert on scenarios for a clean energy future.  Using sophisticated energy-engineering models, Professor Brown has brought a fact-based and authoritative perspective to energy sustainability discussions, influencing policy initiatives across the globe, the U.S., and particularly the South. Her research over the past several years has examined the impact of energy benchmarking to address information gaps in the real estate industry; trade-offs between electric and diesel urban delivery trucks; the potential for U.S. electrical efficiency improvements; the potential for co-generation to improve U.S. industrial competitiveness; and the evolution of smart grid governance. Through the Brook Byers Professorship, Brown will endeavor to expand the sustainability dialogue across campus as a means to establish Georgia Tech as a thought leader on technologies and policies for a clean energy future. 

Elsa Reichmanis, professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a member of the National Academyof Engineering, is an expert in the design of materials architectures for advanced energy applications such as solar cells and batteries. She is specifically focused on developing processes that enable low-cost, large-area, high-throughput manufacturing that uses sustainable, environmentally benign materials and processes. Additionally, Reichmanis is working to enrich the professional development of students, along with enhancing their interest and involvement in sustainable development. Included among these activities are student led invitations to leaders in the sustainability arena; student forums related to sustainability and renewable energy; and support for the development of instructional modules that relate to the sustainability technology/policy interface. About her appointment, Reichmanis said: “Georgia Tech is home to many great programs and initiatives, and as a Brook Byers Professor, I hope to work with my colleagues to help address the many challenges associated with building a sustainable future.

Sustainability Quantified: The ‘Gigaton’ Problem

Figure 1:  Annual global material use.

The anthroposphere (the place where humans live and where human needs are provided for) needs to be recreated to exist within the means of nature. Two important implications can be drawn from this statement: (1) we must use renewable materials that nature provides, and (2) we must not overwhelm natural cycles such that they cease to provide appropriate ecosystem services. The world economy currently uses 70 Gt of materials [1], only 29% of which are renewable (Fig. 1) [2]. Excluding food and fuel from this 70 Gt results in approximately 15Gt of which only 4% is renewable. Human intervention has disrupted nitrogen, phosphorous, water, carbon and other cycles and affected human and ecosystem health through discharges of toxic compounds. 

For example, extracting nitrogen from wastewater requires almost the same amount of energy as fixing nitrogen for fertilizer synthetically from the atmosphere. One-third of the nitrogen synthesized as protein in humans comes from fertilizer that was synthetically fixed from the atmosphere. On the other hand, only about 100 years of minable phosphorous remains, which is essential for agriculture. Altogether, we use about 0.5 Gigaton of fertilizers per year, which are thought to be largely responsible for hypoxia in many coastal water bodies such as the Gulf of Mexico. With respect to carbon, about 9 Gigatons are discharged into the atmosphere annually, which cannot be removed by natural processes at the current pace. Consequently, carbon levels in the atmosphere are increasing and causing climate change. Problems of this massive scale and scope are termed as ‘Gigaton Problems’ [3]. While every incremental solution that attempts to solve these problems is welcome, the magnitude of these problems should always remain in perspective. If a ‘solution’ will address a kiloton of any of the above problems, we would require about a million of those ‘solutions’ to address any of these issues at a meaningful scale. 

The Gigaton problem was created by the billion people in the developed world. By 2050 the world population may reach 10 billion people. Ensuring a secure and safe world requires that all global citizens have sufficient access to the resources necessary to lead useful and productive lives. In other words, the lifestyles of those in the developing world must start to resemble the lifestyles of those in the developed world. Therefore the magnitude of the Gigaton problem will be multiplied by 10 unless new approaches are found. 

Counter intuitively, some aspects of development may curb population growth, thus tempering the magnitude of the Gigaton problem in the future. For example, nearly 5 million children in the developing world die every year from water borne diseases, which are preventable with better water resource development, sanitation, and stormwater control. Higher childhood mortality is one cause of population growth. Women who experience high infant mortality will give birth to more children in hopes that some may survive to adulthood. 

Any potential solution which tries to address any of these Gigaton problems should adopt a two-pronged approach. First, the solutions need to address both the supply as well as the demand side of these problems. While shifting to gasoline-electric hybrid fuel cars substantially reduces the carbon emission per vehicle mile travelled, it would be imprudent to expect that the Earth can support the production, operation and disposal of 8 or 10 billion of those automobiles. There is no conceivable approach to tackle the Gigaton problem without addressing the demands on the anthroposphere. Second, the solutions should be interdisciplinary in nature, addressing the problems simultaneously from the economic, technological and societal perspective. It is imperative to develop an informed citizenry who would facilitate informed decision making, particularly in the socioeconomic sphere. This could in turn lead to sustainable management of the demand side of the Gigaton problem. 

References:

[1] 1 Gigaton, abbreviated as Gt, is equal to 1 billion metric tons (10^9). 
[2] Ashby, M.F., Materials and the Environment: Eco-informed Material Choice. Elsevier, 2012, ISBN 0123859727. 
[3] Xu, M., Crittenden, J.C., Chen, Y., Thomas, V.M., Noonan, D.S., Desroches, R., Brown, M.A., French, S.P., 2010. “Gigaton Problems Need Gigaton Solutions,” Environ. Sci. Technol. 44, 4037–4041.