Planning: Energy-harvesting Concrete Batteries for Smart Buildings and Cities

As the world’s population continues to urbanize, metropolitan areas with intensive buildings will increasingly be the focal point of environmental protection, energy conservation, and greenhouse gas reduction policies. Buildings consume around 49% of the total energy and contribute around 47% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Smart buildings and cities not only need to power traditional heating, ventilation, and HVAC systems, but also require energy to power sensor networks and connected digital technology for real-time data collection, communication, and control to improve efficiency and enhance reliability and safety. The energy supply has become a prominent issue that hinders the development and implementation of smart buildings and cities. There is plenty of energy around and inside a building in different forms, such as kinetic energy from human walking, wind, and thermal. Harvesting this energy can be a sustainable alternative power source to batteries, enabling continuous and maintenance-free Internet of Things operations without environmental impact. Therefore, this planning project will explore a new sustainable energy generation and storage solution for intelligent building structures. This proposed collaborative effort will provide abundant topics and learning opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students in HBCUs, especially for the underrepresented and minorities. The implementation of this project will enhance Science and Engineering education at HBCUs and broaden the participation of underrepresented groups. The National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI) for K-12 students will also involve these concepts in their activities to help young people realize the importance and benefits of smart buildings and cities at an early age. The objective of this planning project is to establish a convergent research team and leverage the complementary expertise of faculty members for addressing energy challenges in smart buildings and cities by exploring the energy harvesting and rechargeable concrete batteries. Various planning activities are proposed, including 1) group meetings; 2) workshops: A two-day workshop will be held to identify the knowledge gap and research questions in energy harvesting and rechargeable concrete batteries for smart buildings and cities; 3) NSF-funded smart building project visit: Team members and selected students from TSU, JSU and PSB will travel to the Sustainable Smart Cities Research Center (SSCRC) in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). The team members and students cannot only fill the gaps in the knowledge of smart cities from the visit, but also help the team members to learn the successful experience of research on zero-energy smart cities; and 4) outreach activities: A course module will be provided to educate the general public through the NSTI summer camp and project website. The development of this collaborative work will advance the state-of-the-art in the research of energy harvesting and storage technology, advanced construction materials, and energy solutions for smart buildings and cities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.