Researchers Developing New Desalination Process
Researchers from NMSU’s Physical Science Laboratory (PSL) have received $400,000 from the state of New Mexico to develop a new technology for water desalination.
The funding comes from Gov. Bill Richardson’s $10 million Water Innovation Fund, which was established to provide solutions to New Mexico’s water crisis.
Much of New Mexico’s groundwater contains salt in concentrations too high for use as either drinking water or for irrigation. PSL submitted a proposal for a new desalinization process that is based on proprietary technology developed by its Emerging Technologies Laboratory. The process separates dissolved solids, resulting in water suitable for agriculture or drinking. The process can be tailored to provide water of varying levels of purity. For instance, if the water were to be used for agriculture, it would not be purified as much as water to be used for drinking.
Researchers at PSL will use the state funds to set up a desalinization demonstration plant on the NMSU campus. The technology developed by PSL differs from the two traditional water desalination techniques, reverse osmosis and thermal distillation. In the reverse osmosis process, water is pumped through a membrane at high pressure. Fresh water is able to pass through, while salt is left behind. In thermal distillation, water is heated to steam and re-condensed to remove the salt.
“Both processes have their drawbacks,” says Bob Silver, director of PSL’s Emerging Technologies Laboratory. “Reverse osmosis purification systems use fragile membranes that are prone to fouling. Regular replacement of the membranes in a commercial desalination plant constitutes the single highest cost factor for delivering purified water. Thermal distillation plants require large amounts of energy to heat water for evaporation, resulting in high fuel costs for operation.”
Silver says PSL researchers are optimistic that their technology will use approximately the same amount of energy to purify water as the reverse osmosis technique, but without the need to regularly replace membranes and other high-cost items.
For more information: Bob Silver, bsilver@psl.nmsu.edu
Salt Cedar Removal – New Mexico Style
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Last fall, several hundred goats began devouring salt cedar trees along the Rio Grande Bosque in Albuquerque and Ute Creek in Harding County as part of a three-year project financed by a $100,000 grant from the state Legislature.
The project will allow researchers to measure the impact of goat grazing on salt cedar and other nonnative vegetation, while offering goat herders training to bid on future contracts.
“As these kinds of grazing projects spread, we think there are opportunities for New Mexico goat producers. It’s a win-win situation,” says Manny Encinias, a livestock specialist with NMSU’s Cooperative Extension Service.
Encinias is monitoring the Rio Grande Bosque project closely, along with Pat Melendrez, an extension natural resource agent. If the pilot project is successful, officials from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District plan a larger program utilizing goats to control salt cedar, Russian olive and some other weeds.
While goats alone won’t eradicate invasive species, they can be used effectively in combination with other methods such as mechanical treatments or chemical spraying. And goats have another positive benefit: the pounding of their hooves helps restore native grasses and other vegetation.
For more information: Manny Encinias, mencinia@nmsu.edu or Pat Melendrez, smelendr@nmsu.edu
Rocks Reveal Prehistoric Lifestyle
An inventory of archaeological sites on an Army training area in southeastern Colorado is leading to new findings about how early people lived.
NMSU archaeologist Larry Loendorf has been conducting a cultural resource inventory of the 243,000-acre Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site since 1995. Piñon Canyon was inhabited by hunter-gatherers 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, but had never been studied until the Army purchased the area from private ranchers in 1983.
Loendorf has found more than 3,000 sites of historical significance in the area, including ancient campsites and rock art drawings.
“Piñon Canyon does not have any large structures like Canyon De Shelly, but it is very rich in archaeology,” Loendorf says. “It is one of the most exciting rock art sites in the world.”
Loendorf, who is a leading authority on rock art, says some of the drawings in Piñon Canyon provide new insight into how hunter-gatherers survived. For example, he has found some drawings on boulders that show animals and nets. The boulders with this art are near a basalt dike, and Loendorf believes the hunters drove animals into nets placed over a break in this dike. While similar rock art has been found in Utah, the Piñon Canyon site is the farthest east in which such drawings have been found.
The ancient campsites also are revealing some interesting findings. One site yielded more than 100 arrowheads. Others had evidence of cactus roasting pits.
“They were eating cholla cactus,” Loendorf says. “This shows that these hunter-gatherers were fairly sophisticated at taking advantage of plants – and at surviving in a pretty rigorous environment.”
Artifacts that Loendorf collects are taken to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, where they are available to other researchers. The sites that he discovers are fenced off so that the Army avoids them during its training maneuvers.
“About 10 percent of the sites we have found are eligible for the National Register,” he says.
Loendorf has more than $800,000 in contracts from the Army to continue inventorying the canyon. About 20 NMSU students assist with his research each summer.
For more information: Larry Loendorf, lll@loendorf.net
Astronomers Aid in Planet Discovery
Two NMSU astronomers played a critical role in the discovery of one of the smallest planets outside our solar system.
The discovery, announced by NASA last September, was one of the year’s most important findings in the field of astronomy.
Tom Harrison, an observatory research specialist, and Joni Johnson, a research fellow, helped Barbara McArthur from the University of Texas at Austin find a planet the size of Neptune that orbits a star about 41 light-years from Earth.
Finding extrasolar planets is difficult because researchers cannot see the planets directly with existing telescopes. Instead, they must infer their presence by precisely measuring wiggles in the position of the stars the planets are orbiting. This is because as a planet orbits a star, its gravity tugs it slightly out of position.
Finding large extrasolar planets has been easier because they give stars a bigger gravitational tug. To date, researchers have found nearly 130 extrasolar planets the size of Jupiter, which weighs 318 times as much as Earth.
The extrasolar planet Harrison and Johnson helped find is one of only three known extrasolar planets the size of Neptune, or about 14 times the mass of Earth. The researchers, who are experts in the meticulous calculation of the distance to stars, did their work using the Apache Point Observatory near Cloudcroft and a small telescope on the NMSU campus.
The discovery is expected to usher in a new era for extrasolar planet hunting. It also brings scientists much closer to finding planets in other solar systems that may harbor life.
For more information: Tom Harrison, tharriso@nmsu.edu
NMSU, Sharp Team Up on Solar Research
NMSU has signed an agreement with the Solar Systems Division of Sharp Corp. of Japan to evaluate several of its solar energy products. The products will be evaluated by the Southwest Technology Development Institute (SWTDI), a research department in NMSU’s College of Engineering.
NMSU’s research for Sharp is part of a larger agreement facilitated by Gov. Bill Richardson’s office between the company and several research organizations in New Mexico. Sharp was attracted to New Mexico because of the high level of research capabilities found in the state.
Under the agreement, SWTDI engineers will evaluate several of Sharp’s latest photovoltaic products designed for the growing building-integrated solar electricity market. They also will test and evaluate high-efficiency, concentrating solar photovoltaic modules.
“Concentrating solar power is a technology that works best under cloudless conditions, so New Mexico is the ideal place to set up a test center,” says Andrew Rosenthal, senior program manager of SWTDI.
Under the same agreement, SWTDI is going to conduct a market study in Mexico and Latin America prior to Sharp’s introduction of its products in those regions.
Sharp is the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic modules, with one-fourth of the $4 billion worldwide market.
For more information: Andrew Rosenthal, arosenth@nmsu.edu
Smart Bridge II
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The grant will enable Rola Idriss, a professor of civil engineering, to install fiber-optic sensors in the bridge’s concrete beams. These sensors will relay information about the effects of stress on the bridge long before any signs of aging begin to show, allowing engineers to address potential problems before they become serious and costly.
The bridge will be the second interstate highway bridge in New Mexico that Idriss has fitted with this type of technology. The first, on Interstate 10 over University Avenue in Las Cruces, opened in July 2004 and was the first interstate highway bridge in the nation to be fitted with such technology (see NMSU Research, 2004).
The new bridge is part of a $5.7 million project to reconstruct the I-25 interchange at Doña Ana. The project is expected to begin in August.
The new bridge in Doña Ana will be the first “smart bridge” to be monitored remotely. Data from the bridge will be transmitted to NMSU.
Idriss said construction of this newest bridge shows that “smart bridge” technology is on the road to becoming standard in the industry. Since the first “smart bridge” was opened in Las Cruces, Idriss has received requests from around the world from researchers who want to apply the technology in their countries.
For more information: Rola Idriss, ridriss@nmsu.edu
University Joins Statewide Research Collaborative
NMSU has joined a new partnership designed to help “bundle” New Mexico’s intellectual property, thus creating opportunities for economic growth.
The partnership is called the New Mexico Technology Research Collaborative (TRC) and includes 11 of the state’s universities, national laboratories and research institutions.
The collaborative is seeking $42 million from the state Legislature over the next five years to serve as “seed money” for six new advanced technology centers. The centers would be designed to be self-sustaining within five years.
If successful, the collaborative estimates that the centers would create more than
13,000 jobs in the state by 2015.
NMSU would be the lead institution on two of these – the Center for Sustainable Natural Resources in the Southwest and the Center for Technology Translation, Integration of Security Technologies and Decision Support. TRC is seeking $4 million to start each of these centers.
NMSU would be a collaborator on two additional centers – the New Mexico Center for Optics and the Center for Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and End-User Technologies.
The centers are modeled after five created in the 1980s with $30 million in state money. Two of those were located at NMSU – The Center for Plant Genetic Engineering and the Center for Computer Research Applications.
For more information: www.techventures.org/NewMenuTechVentures/TVCNM/NMTRC/NMTRC.htm
NMSU Establishes New Bioinformatics Center
New Mexico State University has received a five-year, $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a new center that will focus on the emerging field of bioinformatics. It will be the first such research center in New Mexico.
Bioinformatics, or computational biology, involves the application of information technology to the understanding of biological processes. It has implications for a variety of fields, including medicine, agriculture and homeland security.
“Right now biological data is accumulating at a rate that outpaces the development of computational tools to analyze it,” says Desh Ranjan, head of the Department of Computer Science at NMSU. An example of this, Ranjan says, is the Human Genome Project, in which DNA sequences are accumulating faster than researchers can figure out what they mean.
Goals of the new center include developing software that can help biologists in their studies and training students for careers in bioinformatics.
“We need people who are skilled in working with data as well as the underlying science,” Ranjan says. “There is a huge shortage of such people nationwide, even internationally.”
The new center will draw together researchers from the departments of computer science, biology and biochemistry, and agronomy and horticulture.
For more information: Desh Ranjan, dranjan@nmsu.edu
Stealth Coatings May Make Aircraft Truly Invisible
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The ability to make people – or things – invisible might not be the stuff of science fiction movies anymore.
An NMSU researcher has a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense to develop a technique to make stealth aircraft truly invisible.
Currently, stealth aircraft aren’t really invisible, explains physicist Seamus “Shay” Curran, head of the nanotechnology program at NMSU. The aircraft have coatings that deflect radio waves, thus making them “invisible” to electronic tracking devices, but still visible to the human eye.
Using nanotechnology, Curran and collaborators at Wake Forest University and the University of Florida hope to develop intelligent coatings that will enable aircraft to change colors like a chameleon to blend in with the background, thus making them harder for ground forces to see. They also are developing a coating that would bend light a certain way, making it difficult to focus on an object. They also are working on a coating to thwart missiles that use infrared lock-on targeting systems. Another would shield pilots from electromagnetic interference, protecting against electronic attacks on systems and communications.
Although the Defense Department is interested in the military applications of the coatings, Curran expects the new materials will have numerous commercial applications as well.
For more information: Shay Curran, scurran@nmsu.edu
Researchers Volunteer to Assist with Disaster Relief
More than three dozen researchers from across NMSU have volunteered to help rebuild areas devastated by the Asian tsunami in December – or future natural disasters anywhere in the world.
The NMSU volunteers have expertise in water issues ranging from desalination to waste water treatment to water-borne diseases. Still others have expertise in farm and ranchland restoration, civil engineering, public health, public utilities, business development and re-establishment, communications and community organization.
Don Birx, interim vice provost for research, assembled the cadre of volunteers from different disciplines. Everett Egginton, vice provost for international programs, is coordinating contact between the university and international agencies that will be involved in the reconstruction projects.
“President Michael Martin sees this as a permanent task force,” Egginton says.
“NMSU is a repository of talent and knowledge in areas crucial to rebuilding after a disaster and as such can have a team ready and able to respond to other disasters and emergencies around the nation and the world.”
For more information: Everett Egginton, egginton@nmsu.edu
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