August 2008 Archives

You probably won’t be able to drive down the highway in your own non-polluting vehicle that runs on hydrogen power any time soon. And don’t start making plans to power your whole house with expensive hydrogen-based technology in the coming years. But, some day in the not-too-distant future, you might own a cell phone equipped with a hydrogen-powered fuel cell instead of a battery.

The cell phone would come with an insert-ready hydrogen pack and a small solar array for charging.

“We need to be realistic about what we can and can’t do with hydrogen right now,” says Dr. Scott Grasman. “In addition to some of the more Buck Rogers things that might happen in the future, we need to study some of the things we can do in the short term.”

Read the full story here.

In one corner of a huge civil engineering laboratory on campus, Dr. Ronaldo Luna watches a machine shake silt from the Mississippi River until it liquefies.

“This is what would happen during a major earthquake along the Mississippi River,” Luna says.

Researchers don’t fully understand the liquefaction process for silts (they have a better understanding of how it works with sands), but Luna is confident, based on his tests, that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake or bigger would cause solid surfaces along the banks of the Mississippi River to turn, momentarily, into liquid.

This would be very bad. Read the full story here.

This summer, while political candidates (and Paris Hilton) have been arguing about ways to address the nation’s dependence on oil, some ambitious college students from around the world – including one student from Missouri S&T – have been actively working on projects designed to solve problems in developing countries. Michelle Marincel has been helping to design an ergonomic thresher that would reduce the amount of labor required by African women who harvest grains.

Missouri S&T is hosting an earthquake preparedness conference this week. One of the speakers, Dr. David Rogers, cited cracked oil and gas pipelines in the Midwest as one of the consequences of a major New Madrid earthquake. Rogers was quoted as follows by the Associated Press:

"The economic consequences are horrid," said Rogers, who has assessed responses to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Northridge earthquake in California, among other disasters. "The shock factor of having unavailable fuel would be unprecedented."

Read the full story as published by Forbes.com here.

The conference also got some TV coverage. KY-3's Dave Snider came up to Rolla yesterday morning and later got a tour of the structures lab in the civil engineering building from Dr. D.J. Belarbi.

This is what happens when you are a TV producer and you challenge Dr. Paul Worsey, explosives expert, to blow up a Ford Escort. (Check the explosives archives on the right side of the page for more stuff about S&T explosives.)

P.S. Later this week, we'll have a link to a story about an S&T graduate student who is helping to design a bicycle that makes harvesting grain easier for African women and some researchy stuff about Dr. Renaldo Luna, who recently explained liquefaction (and why it's bad for bridges during an earthquake) to us.

P.P.S. That reminds us, this week we're hosting a big earthquake conference on campus. We'll try to bring you an interesting report on that as well.

A fleet of hydrogen-fueled cars will cruise into town on Tuesday, Aug. 19, as part of a cross-country road trip sponsored by the U.S. Energy and Transportation departments, several automakers, the National Hydrogen Association, and others. The hydrogen cars will be on display at Missouri's first hydrogen fueling station, which is located on Missouri S&T's E-Cubed (energy, environment and education) Commons.

The event begins at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 19, at the site, 900 Collegiate Blvd. In conjunction with the tour, Missouri S&T will officially cut the ribbon for the fueling station and show off the campus's two Ford H2ICE (hydrogen internal combustion engine) buses used to shuttle passengers around Rolla and to and from Fort Leonard Wood. More information about the event is in the official news release.