Water is a vital resource – for society and also for many industrial processes. There are increasingly complex challenges in this sector: detecting and addressing contaminents, wastewater treatment, valuing and monetizing water and managing water-intensive operations to name a few.
Also, like much of our industrial infrastructure there is a pressing need to modernize, digitize and optimize equipment, plant and systems. Here we will present new MIT research, technologies and spinoff companies for sensing, treatment processes, remote monitoring and digitalization. We will be joined by industry leaders who will discuss and share their innovations and experiences with new technology – insights that are transferrable to other large industrial and infrastructure sectors.
Join the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems lab (J-WAFS) at MIT on April 6, 2021 for Water and Industry, an installment of our Spring 2021 virtual conference series. This webinar will be followed by an ILP Members-only webinar on April 8.
J.J. Laukaitis joined the Industrial Liaison Program in 2012 and is a strong believer in the amplifying power that comes from building enduring relationships between industry leaders and MIT researchers and innovators.
J.J. has over 25 years of experience in engineering, product management and commercial sales management across multiple industries including mechanical design and manufacturing, electronics, semiconductor equipment, health care IT and renewable energy.
In his work for PTC, Continuum, Teradyne, DFT Microsystems and GE, J.J. has managed programs to conceive, design and launch new products and services and has led major initiatives to transform customer information into insight for revenue growth.
Steven B. Leeb received his doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. He has served as a commissioned officer in the USAF reserves, and he has been a member of the M.I.T. faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1993. He also holds a joint appointment in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. He currently serves as MacVicar Fellow and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems. In his capacity as a Professor at M.I.T, he is concerned with the design, development, and maintenance processes for all kinds of machinery with electrical actuators, sensors, or power electronic drives. A major thrust in his current research is the development of power electronic drives and supplies for servomechanical and industrial applications, including medical drug delivery devices, battery chargers, motion controllers and fluorescent lamp ballasts. Another research interest related to power quality issues and on-line machine diagnostics involves the development of a Nonintrusive Load Monitor (NILM). The NILM determines the operating schedule of the major electrical loads in a commercial or industrial building from measurements made solely at the electrical utility service entry. He is currently working to develop the NILM into a virtually sensorless platform to determine power quality, perform critical load diagnostics, and monitor manufacturing processes and actuator performance on ships, aircraft, automobiles, and satellites. He is the author or co-author of over 200 publications and 20 US Patents in the fields of electromechanics and power electronics.
When did it become normal for unprecedented quantities of data about you to automatically become the property of others? Why have we returned to a "server" model of information exchange for so many of our data services, reminiscent in ways of the early days of mainframe computing, where "someone else" is responsible for data security and service availability?
We are considering approaches for developing nonintrusive sensors that are relatively easy to install. These sensors offer several potential advantages. They can be installed at a central location and used to monitor the aggregate behavior of a collection of devices, reducing installation costs. Signal processing techniques can be used to disaggregate the behavior of individual devices influencing the aggregate stream. Data from these nonintrusive sensors is inherently collated. This talk will review three different examples of nonintrusive sensors: the Electronic Stethoscope, WaterWolf, and VAMPIRE. These three sensor systems permit nonintrusive monitoring of electric power consumption, water or fluid consumption, and electromechanical system performance including vibration monitoring, respectively. This talk will examine approaches for deploying and coordinating the operation of these sensors to secure data, minimize the need for communication bandwidth, and ensure the presentation of actionable information for enhancing system operation.
Akselos: Digital twins for industrial installations
Dr. Knezevic, from Perth, Western Australia, is the CTO of Akselos. In this role, he has coordinated the delivery of simulation frameworks to the Power Systems and Mining industries. He holds a Ph.D. from Oxford (Rhodes scholar) and was a post-doc at MIT where he worked on Akselos' core technology. He was a Lecturer at Harvard University for three years before joining Akselos full time.
In 2015 David has represented Akselos at numerous prestigious conferences, like the ASME TurboExpo 2015, and the ‘Analysis, Simulation, and Systems Engineering Software Summit (ASSESS)’, where he’s part of the Initiative Advisory Committee Meeting. He has access to a vast network of leaders and practitioners who play a role in shaping the future of the field.
David is a co-author (with colleagues from MIT) of the patent "Methods and apparatus for constructing and analyzing component-based models of engineering systems" that is one of the foundations of Akselos' technology.
In September 2011, Dr. Knezevic was part of the team that won the largest Deshpande innovation grant at MIT, which led to the launch of Akselos.
Dr. Duane S. Boning is the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in Electrical Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the EECS Department at MIT. He is affiliated with the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and serves as MTL Associate Director for Computation and CAD. He is also the Engineering Faculty Co-Director of the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program, serving in that role since September 2016. From 2004 to 2011, he served as Associate Head of the EECS Department at MIT. From 2011 through 2013 he was the Director/Faculty Lead of the MIT Skoltech Initiative, and from 2011 through July 2018, he was the faculty Director of the MIT/Masdar Institute Cooperative Program.
Dr. Boning received his S.B. degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science in 1984, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1986 and 1991, respectively, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an NSF Fellow from 1984 to 1989, and an Intel Graduate Fellow in 1990. From 1991 to 1993 he was a Member Technical Staff at the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Process and Design Center in Dallas, Texas, where he worked on semiconductor process representation, process/device simulation tool integration, and statistical modeling and optimization.
Dr. Boning is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has served as Editor in Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, and as chairman of the CFI/Technology CAD Framework Semiconductor Process Representation Working Group. He is a member of the IEEE, Electrochemical Society, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Materials Research Society, Sigma Xi, and the Association of Computing Machinery.
Sourcewater: Real-time geospatial water and energy activity intelligence
Joshua Adler is the Founding Chief Executive of Sourcewater (www.sourcewater.com), the technology leader in holistic energy intelligence. Sourcewater gathers, analyzes and visualizes omnichannel data to show upstream energy and water activity earlier, more completely and more accurately than other sources. Its data science innovations combining satellite imagery, mobile GPS, geoscience and regulatory big data analytics have earned 13 U.S. patents. Sourcewater has been honored by IHS CERAWeek as an Energy Innovation Pioneer, by Frost & Sullivan as Supply Chain Enabling Technology of the Year, by the Oil & Gas Awards as New Technology of the Year, and by TPH as an Energy Disruptor. Clients include some of the largest U.S. E&P, infrastructure and service companies.
Josh previously served as Chief Speechwriter to the U.S. Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush and co-founded medical device company iLife Systems, robotics company MegaBots, LaKritz Adler Development and Amour.com, the first online matchmaking company. He sits on advisory boards of several AI companies including ZyloTech and Cortex Automation. He is a graduate of Yale and MIT, where he was a Sloan Fellow for Innovation and Global Leadership in Energy Ventures. He has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist and Wired. He is the sole inventor on ten U.S. patents relating to AI, machine learning and computer vision methods in image processing. Josh lives in Houston, Texas.
SiTration: Ultra-durable filtration membranes for cost- and energy-efficient industrial separations
Brendan Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO of SiTration, a company spun out of MIT in 2020 to commercialize a filtration membrane technology invented by the founders. The SiTration membrane is a patented filtration technology designed to improve the efficiency of resource-intensive industrial separations by as much as 10X, while minimizing capital cost. Dr. Smith earned a Ph.D. in materials science & engineering from MIT and a B.S. in nanotechnology engineering from the University of Waterloo. He is passionate about developing new materials to address societal challenges at the water-energy-waste nexus.
Professor of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) Professor of Biological Engineering, Biological Engineering Division
Dr. Jongyoon Han is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received B.S.(1992) and M.S.(1994) degree in physics from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, and Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Cornell University in 2001. He was a research scientist in Sandia National Laboratories (Livermore, CA), until he joined the MIT faculty in 2002. He received NSF CAREER award (2003) and Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award (ACS, 2009). His research is mainly focused on applying micro/nanofabrication techniques to a very diverse set of fields and industries, including biosensing, desalination / water purification, biomanufacturing, dentistry, and neuroscience. He is currently the lead PI for MIT’s participation for NIIMBL (The National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals).
While the conventional water treatment technology is relatively well-established, we see a continuously increased list of emerging water contaminants (heavy metals, PFAS, infectious pathogens, pharmaceuticals, etc.), which poses challenges for both detection/monitoring and removal technologies. Many of these emerging contaminants need to be detected at the lowest abundance level, challenging our ability to monitor environmental contamination continuously. Besides, targeted removal processes (often based on chemical treatment) are deployed as ‘add-on’ to existing water treatment processes, increasing the cost significantly without offering the flexibility for dealing with various emerging contaminants. In the Han group (MIT), we approach these challenges by developing electrokinetic contaminant concentration/removal processes called Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP). A diverse class of contaminants (TSS, heavy metal, biomolecules, cells, salt ions, etc.) can be concentrated for more sensitive detection and removed to generate clean water in a single-step process. Our vision is to combine advanced monitoring with advanced removal, providing technical options for intelligent contamination management for many different application scenarios such as industrial/agricultural/domestic water generation.
Gradiant: Solving complex water and wastewater treatment challenges
Dr. Anurag Bajpayee is the co-founder and CEO of Gradiant Corporation. Gradiant is a Technology-driven Water Services Company with a suite of proprietary technologies to enable efficient, economical industrial water treatment and recycling currently focused on the oil & gas, mining, and power sectors. Anurag earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT where he worked on desalination and water treatment, with a core focus on treatment of oil & gas produced water. His doctoral work on Directional Solvent Extraction (DSE) desalination was recognized by the Scientific American as a top 10 world changing idea and is now part of Gradiant’s technology portfolio. Anurag has co-authored 5 peer reviewed journal publications and holds 7 issued or pending patents in the field of water treatment. He earned a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Missouri and a Masters degree from MIT.
Rohit Karnik is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Microfluidics and Nanofluidics Research Group. He obtained his B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay in 2002, and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2006 under the guidance of Prof. Arun Majumdar. After postdoctoral work with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2007. His research focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and design of micro- and nanofluidic devices for applications in healthcare, energy systems, and biochemical separation and analysis. Among other honors, he is a recipient of the Institute Silver Medal (IIT Bombay, 2002), NSF Career Award (2010), Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education (2011), DOE Early Career Award (2012), and IIT Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award (2014).
Innovations across the entire spectrum of technology, policy, business, and society are needed to address the challenge of providing an adequate amount of clean water in the 21st century. In this talk, I will present our work on exploring unconventional materials and paradigms for water purification and quality control to address this challenge. At the smallest scale, we present the development of atomically thin membranes made from a single atom-thick layer of graphene, where water can rapidly flow through engineered angstrom-sized pores that reject contaminant molecules and salt ions. I will discuss advances in pore creation, fabrication, and scale-up that illustrate the feasibility of realizing this new class of membrane that could lead to more energy-efficient, compact, and versatile water purification systems. At a larger scale, we show that the sapwood of conifers can be used as natural, chemical-free, low-cost, and easily manufactured filters to remove microbes and turbidity from drinking water. These filters exploit the naturally-occurring membranes in the xylem tissue of plants to remove microbes and present opportunities to create unique pay-as-you-go business models for household water filters with replacement costs of only a few cents. We also present human-centric filter device design and field studies that illustrate the potential of xylem filters to provide clean water to people without access to existing water purification technologies. At the systems scale, we present our findings through field studies in India and technology development to address the gap in monitoring trace contaminants in water by ‘dry sampling’ – a paradigm that repurposes materials developed to easily preserve and convey water samples from the water source to a central laboratory, thereby enabling the measurement of trace contaminants that is not possible with local infrastructure. These studies illustrate the opportunities and challenges involved in fundamental research and development and its translation to ground reality to provide clean water in the coming decades.