REU Site: Advanced materials and processes for a resilient society

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The built environment is the combination of physical infrastructure and chemical/energy processes that manages inputs of resources and outputs of waste products in order to ensure the health, prosperity, security, and welfare of the nation. The modern built environment is vulnerable to a changing climate, to a legacy of environmental contamination, to inevitable deterioration, and to the growing scarcity of energy and material resources. Although over $100 billion is spent on the built environment in America each year, these vulnerabilities are more widespread, and of greater potential importance, than at any other point in the nation's history - groups such as the American Society of Civil Engineers rate US infrastructure to be on the D+ level, and the Department of Homeland Security considers "ageing infrastructure" to pose as much of a threat to the nation as terrorism or pandemic. In order to address these vulnerabilities, new, more durable materials must be investigated; processes must be discovered that will produce these materials at a reduced energy demand; new strategies by which waste materials can be diverted from disposal sites or transformed into valuable products must be implemented; and a generation of engineers and scientists of diverse backgrounds with the technical knowledge and professional skills to implement, adapt, and develop these materials and processes must be trained. As an interdisciplinary collaboration between the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, this REU site will focus on developing such materials and processes. The site will focus specifically on recruiting a diverse, underserved population of well-qualified students, while third-party assessment of the site will lead to continuous improvement and the wide-spread dissemination of research results.Maintaining the rapidly deteriorating built environment is one of the most significant challenges of the modern age: The National Academy of Engineering considers it to be one of the 14 "Grand Challenges" in engineering. Research carried out at this REU site will focus on the interdisciplinary investigation of both materials and processes. Materials of interest include unconventional infrastructure systems, bio-inspired materials for structural applications, and advanced composite systems; processes of interest include biomass conversion, the reclamation of rare earth elements from waste streams, and multiscalar additive manufacturing. Modern pedagogical methods such as distributed mentorship, drawn from the forefront of research in engineering education, will be employed to maximize impact on undergraduate researchers. The fundamental scientific advances made through this research will help to ensure that current and future societal needs will be sustainably supported, both within the US and across the world.