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Student, faculty and staff news
Dr. Scott Amos will receive the School of Mines Virginia Simpson Award at the Employee Service and Recognition Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, May 4, 2011. This award was established by Virginia Simpson to recognize and encourage involvement by SDSM&T faculty or staff with the Rapid City community.
Congratualtions to the ASCE student chapter for a great showing at the regional competition in Colorao Springs!
2011 ASCE student team.
BS EnvE seniors Aaron Oswald, Christopher Lupo, Cassandra Schultz, and Robert Prann, accompanied by faculty advisor Dr. Henry Mott, attended the 21st International Environmental Design Contest sponsored by the Institute for Energy and Environment and Waste Energy Research Consortium of the New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM April 2-6, 2011. The team addressed the design task focusing upon the capture of carbon dioxide from coal-fired generator flue gas and both sequestration and re-use of the captured carbon dioxide.
The team assembled a bench scale gas-liquid absorber and conducted experiments to to quantitatively characterize absorber performance. A model was developed and employed for analysis of the bench scale test data and sizing of full-scale absorbers, with the Black Hills Corporation's WyGen III power plant, near Gillette, WY, as a prototype. The design considers generation capacity and environmental controls for nitrogen and sulfur oxides for retrofitting to coal-fired generators. A written report detailing the capture, sequestration and re-use systems, as well as economic, legal, societal and safety issues, was submitted in advance of the on-site contest activities.
In Las Cruces, the team delivered an oral presentation, displayed a poster, and conducted a demonstration of their bench-scale process, during which actual mass transfer data were obtained, analyzed, interpreted and used to illustrate the scale-up process to the judges. Although the first and second place awards eluded the team, the contest judges recognized SDSM&T's WERC team with a judges' choice award for the best engineering analysis.
Team members Dustin Jordan and Kristi Chamley, unable to travel to Las Cruces for the on-site activities, will be available with the team's bench scale system and poster at SDSM&T's annual design fair on April 19th.
Dr. Henry Mott (Faculty Advisor), Aaron Oswald, Dr. Abbas Ghassemi (WERC Executive Director), Cassandra Schultz, Christopher Lupo, and Robert Prann at the 2011 WERC International Environmental Design Contest.
The following CEE students received the Civil and Environmental Engineering Departmental Awards at the Honors Convocation on April 7th: Tony Kulesa obtained the Outstanding Civil Engineering Junior Award, Gerald Bollinger and Karen Schaefers received the Outstanding Civil Engineering Senior Award, and Christopher Lupo and Aaron Oswald received the Outstanding Environmental Engineering Senior.
Dr. Sangchul Bang recently received the Korean Geotechnical Society award in March. He's shown below with Dr. Suzanne Lacasse, the Managing Director of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute.
Dr. Suzanne Lacasse and Dr. Sangchul Bang.
We had several CEE students give oral presentations in the School of Mines Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 4th: Tony Kulsea (CE) presented "Laminate thickness analysis for the VARTM process," Kody Heller (CE) presented "Tension testing of concrete, Michelle Kelly (EnvE) presented "Methods of extraction and preparation for analysis of bottom sediment core samples from Black Hills area lakes and reservoirs" (and won third prize), and Stephen Kilber (CE) presented "Self-healing concrete."
Dr. James Stone and co-authors Erin Dreis (MSCE, currently at SD-DENR), Christopher Lupo (BS EnvE student), and Sharon Clay (SDSU) have had their paper "Land application of tylosin and chlortetracycline swine manure: impacts to soil nutrients and soil microbial community structure" accepted by the Journal of Environmental Science and Health, Part B: Pesticides, Food Contaminants, and Agricultural Wastes.
Dr. Stone co-authored the paper "Environmental impacts from wind erosion of abandoned mine lands" with Dr. Larry Stetler that was accepted to the International Symposium on Erosion and Landscape Evolution conference in Anchorage AK this September. He co-authored two other papers, "Sediment pore-water equilibria interactions associated with arsenic and uranium transport within a historical uranium mining-impacted watershed in South Dakota" with Lance Larson (MSCE, currently at Penn State) and Greg Kipp (MS GeoE), and "Arsenic speciation in sediment and pore waters of the historical mining-impacted Belle Fourche and Cheyenne River floodplains" with Bryce Pfiefle (MS GeoE student) for the 28th Annual Meeting of American Society of Mining & Reclamation conference in Bismarck ND this June.
Dr. Lance Roberts presented his findings from his project entitled, Preliminary Laboratory Evaluation of Fiber Reinforced Asphalt Concrete at the SD Department of Transportation Research Review Board Meeting on April 13th in Pierre, SD. Dr. Molly Gribb also attended the meeting and updated the board on recent research activities at the School of Mines.
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