The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Methods Lab (J-WAFS) offers Options Grants to assist MIT researchers launch startup firms or merchandise to commercialize breakthrough applied sciences in water and meals methods. The Options Grant Program started in 2015 and is supported by Group Jameel. Along with one-year, renewable grants of as much as $150,000, this system additionally matches grantees with trade mentors and facilitates introductions to potential buyers. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Options Program has awarded over $3 million in funding to the MIT neighborhood. Quite a few startups and merchandise, together with a conveyable desalination system and an organization commercializing a novel meals security sensor, have spun out of this assist.

The 2023 J-WAFS Options Grantees are Professor C. Cem Tasan of the Division of Supplies Science and Engineering and Professor Andrew Whittle of the Division of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Tasan’s mission entails decreasing water use in metal manufacturing and Whittle’s mission tackles dangerous algal blooms in water. Challenge work commences this September.

“This 12 months’s Options Grants are being award to professors Tasan and Whittle to assist commercialize applied sciences they’ve been creating at MIT,” says J-WAFS government director Renee J. Robins. “With J-WAFS’ assist, we hope to see the groups transfer their applied sciences from the lab to the market, to allow them to have a useful affect on water use and water high quality challenges,” Robins provides.

Decreasing water consumption by solid-state steelmaking

Water is a significant requirement for metal manufacturing. The metal trade ranks fourth in industrial freshwater consumption worldwide, since giant quantities of water are wanted primarily for cooling functions within the course of. Sadly, a powerful correlation has additionally been proven to exist between freshwater use in steelmaking and water contamination. As the worldwide demand for metal will increase and freshwater availability decreases as a consequence of local weather change, improved strategies for extra sustainable metal manufacturing are wanted.

A technique to cut back the water footprint of steelmaking is to discover metal recycling processes that keep away from liquid metallic processing. With this motivation, Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Affiliate Professor of Metallurgy within the Division of Supplies Science and Engineering, and postdoc Onur Guvenc PhD created a brand new course of known as scrap metallic consolidation (SMC). SMC relies on a well-established metallic forming course of often known as roll bonding. Conventionally, roll bonding requires intensive prior floor therapy of the uncooked materials, particular atmospheric situations, and excessive deformation ranges. Tasan and Guvenc’s analysis revealed that SMC can overcome these restrictions by enabling the solid-state bonding of scrap right into a sheet metallic type, even when the floor high quality, atmospheric situations, and deformation ranges are suboptimal. By way of lab-scale proof-of-principle investigations, they’ve already recognized SMC course of situations and validated the mechanical formability of ensuing metal sheets, specializing in delicate metal, the commonest sheet metallic scrap.

The J-WAFS Options Grant will assist the group to construct buyer product prototypes, design the processing unit, and develop a scale-up technique and enterprise mannequin. By concurrently lowering water utilization, power demand, contamination danger, and carbon dioxide burden, SMC has the potential to lower the power want for metal recycling by as much as 86 p.c, in addition to scale back the linked carbon dioxide emissions and safeguard the freshwater assets that may in any other case be directed to industrial consumption. 

Detecting dangerous algal blooms in water earlier than it’s too late

Dangerous algal blooms (HABs) are a rising drawback in each freshwater and saltwater environments worldwide, inflicting an estimated $13 billion in annual injury to ingesting water, water for leisure use, business fishing areas, and desalination actions. HABs pose a risk to each human well being and aquaculture, thereby threatening the meals provide. Toxins in HABs are produced by some cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, whose communities change in composition in response to eutrophication from agricultural runoff, sewer overflows, or different occasions. Mitigation of dangers from HABs are simplest when there may be advance warning of those adjustments in algal communities. 

Most in situ measurements of algae are primarily based on fluorescence spectroscopy that’s carried out with LED-induced fluorescence (LEDIF) units, or probes that induce fluorescence of particular algal pigments utilizing LED gentle sources. Whereas LEDIFs present cheap estimates of concentrations of particular person pigments, they lack decision to discriminate algal lessons inside complicated mixtures present in pure water our bodies. In prior analysis, Andrew Whittle, the Edmund Okay. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, labored with colleagues to design REMORA, a low-cost, field-deployable prototype spectrofluorometer for measuring induced fluorescence. This analysis was a part of a collaboration between MIT and the AMS Institute. Whittle and the group efficiently educated a machine studying mannequin to discriminate and quantify cell concentrations for mixtures of various algal teams in water samples via an intensive laboratory calibration program utilizing numerous algae cultures. The group demonstrated these capabilities in a sequence of discipline measurements at places in Boston and Amsterdam. 

Whittle will work with Fábio Duarte of the Division of City Research and Planning, the Senseable Metropolis Lab, and MIT’s Middle for Actual Property to refine the design of REMORA. They are going to develop software program for autonomous operation of the sensor that may be deployed remotely on cellular vessels or platforms to allow high-resolution spatiotemporal monitoring for dangerous algae. Sensor commercialization will hopefully have the ability to exploit the distinctive capabilities of REMORA for long-term monitoring purposes by water utilities, environmental regulatory businesses, and water-intensive industries.