Rendering of new Petroleum Engineering and Research Building.

Texas Tech University alumna Jamie Castagno never was afraid to get her hands dirty. That is why she opted for a career in petroleum engineering.

“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, because my dad is also a graduate from Texas Tech Petroleum Engineering,” said Castagno, a 2011 graduate employed as a production engineer with Chevron. “And as a woman engineer, I know I can bring a different perspective to the table, with opportunities to develop new technologies and influence our ever-growing energy market.”

Castagno is among a growing population of women now entering the field, and just in time. The Energy Information Administration figures indicate that for the first time in 20 years, U.S. oil production in November 2012 averaged more than 7 million barrels a day. The International Energy Agency estimates the U.S. could become the world’s biggest oil producer by 2020, or sooner.

Jamie Castagno

With this oil boom, Texas Tech’s Whitacre College of Engineering welcomes a new era in petroleum engineering education and operations education.

“Students are following the money,” said department chair Marshall Watson, Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering.

New Building Ushers in New Era

Texas Tech’s petroleum engineering department is one of the largest in the country, averaging more than 700 undergraduate students. That number may increase after Spring 2014, following the opening of a new $20 million facility.

“The new building will offer 40,000 square feet of modern classroom and research space,” Watson said. “Students will learn techniques in a hands-on environment.”

Petroleum Engineering and Research Building now under construction.

Techniques include hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” where large high-pressure volumes of fluid are injected at rock formations to open them up for production. A team of Texas Tech researchers, led by George P. Livermore Chair and Professor Mohamed Soliman, recently developed and filed patents for two new fracturing techniques that would cost the same, but maximize output and increase the return.

The new Apache Upstream Research Center will be an important aspect of the new Petroleum Engineering Research Building’s laboratories, focused on the latest environmentally responsible fracturing techniques including horizontal well drilling, rock mechanics, the energy-water nexus, wellbore integrity and well cementing. Research will be conducted in the center by faculty members from multiple engineering disciplines and will advance the leading edge of fracturing procedures and environmentally responsible practices.

Jared Ivanhoe

The Next Generation of Petroleum Engineers

“I am amazed at the current state of the oil and gas industry,” said Jared Ivanhoe, a 2010 Texas Tech petroleum engineering graduate. “What was once unconventional a few years ago is now conventional and safer than ever. We should all be energized about the domestic oil and gas opportunities we have in our own backyards.”

Ivanhoe, who was born and raised in West Texas and now is based in Midland as a production engineer for Chevron, and Castagno fit the profile Watson says is typical of engineering candidates today.

“The majority of our students are from rural areas with that ‘roll-up your sleeves’ mentality, with a hard work ethic,” Watson said.  “The Whitacre College of Engineering has a long reputation for producing graduates that you can put right to work.”

Bob Berry, a 2008 graduate and drilling engineer for Range Resources in Fort Worth, credits Texas Tech’s petroleum engineering program and the diversity in experience among professors with the solid foundation he needed to enter the industry and make an immediate impact.

“The technical education included a thorough technical communications skills course, which is key in today’s petroleum industry environment,” Berry said. “Employers are looking for engineers who are not only able to develop designs, but present their findings to management in a concise and professional manner.”

Many petroleum engineering graduates find careers in the oil fields of West Texas.

Oil Boom Brings Booming Opportunity

As the industry continues to expand, petroleum engineers can now boast one of the best-paid postgraduate jobs on the market. And with at least 40 percent of them set to retire over the next decade, there is a shortage of graduates available to support the industry’s ambitious growth.

“The diversity of the professors’ experience in Texas Tech’s Petroleum Engineering department gives Tech students an advantage coming out of college,” Berry said. “The technical aspects of the engineering and drilling courses, as well as the practical discussions in the class room and drilling fluids lab, were instrumental. Texas Tech provided me with a solid foundation from which to build.”

Watson says the petroleum engineering students are known have been known to eat, work and study together, with a strong sense of comradery.

“They are a tight-knit group, and I encourage that,” said Watson. “I want to see them graduate with a strong sense of dedication to their field and a love for Texas Tech.”

Low-grade cotton is eco-friendly solution to absorbing crude oil spills.

When it comes to cleaning up the next massive crude oil spill, one of the best and most eco-friendly solutions for the job may be low-grade cotton from West Texas.

Seshadri Ramkumar, lead author of the study and manager of the Nonwovens and Advanced Materials Laboratory at The Institute of Environmental and Human Health (TIEHH), said he and his colleagues found that low-micronaire cotton – one of the lowest-quality types of cotton – is most effective at picking up oil. A pound of the low-micronaire cotton can pick up more than 30 pounds of crude oil, and its natural waxiness helps to repel water.

The new study includes some of the first scientific data on unprocessed raw cotton’s use in crude oil spills, and was published in the ACS journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

“In this region, about 10 percent of the cotton grown in West Texas is low micronaire,” he said. “It doesn’t take a dye well, so it gets discounted. However, because low-micronaire cotton is less mature, it shrinks, and you are able to pack more fiber into a given area. The strength here is that the low-micronaire cotton absorbs the most crude oil. The oil is not only stuck to surface, the oil gets absorbed into the fiber.”

Ron Kendall, director emeritus at TIEHH and special assistant to the president, said the Deepwater Horizon disaster emphasized the need for better ways of cleaning up oil spills.

“One of the things we realized from Deepwater Horizon is we didn’t have the best tools for cleanup, and the technology wasn’t right for the booms,” Kendall said. “This discovery that low-micronaire cotton, which is the least valuable cotton, can absorb as much crude oil as it does is a breakthrough discovery. It gives us an excellent tool for cleanup of shorelines, animals and ecologically sensitive areas as well as a new technology for booms that can stop oil sheen moving into wetlands. And it’s biodegradable. This is just another added bonus use for low-end West Texas cotton. Now, farmers have a new use for low-end cotton in a very significant way for oil spill cleanup. It’s a major discovery from scientific and economic standpoints.”

Scientists have done extensive studies on fibers such as barley straw, kapok, polypropylene wool, Ramkumar said. However, big gaps existed in knowledge about their basic crude oil-uptake mechanisms and no data existed on unprocessed raw cotton. His team decided to fill those gaps with research on the oil sorption properties of low-micronaire cotton.

The cotton fibers take up oil in multiple ways, including both absorption and adsorption in which oil sticks to the outer surface of the cotton fiber.

“Our interest was to see how raw cotton straight from the bale picks up the crude oil as well as determining the governing mechanism behind picking up the crude oil,” he said. “We show through sophisticated testing that low-micronaire cotton is much finer and can pick up more crude oil. And crude oil is very different from refined motor oil. It’s very dense and releases toxic vapors. It’s not as easy to get picked up. In contrast to synthetic sorbents, raw cotton with its high crude oil sorption capacity and positive environmental footprint make it an ecologically friendly sorbent for oil spill cleanups.”

Laboratory work using crude oil was performed by graduate student Vinitkumar Singh. Both Cotton Incorporated and The CH Foundation contributed funds to this research.

For a PDF of this research, contact John Davis

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Robert Baker (Photo courtesy of Neal Hinkle)

On Friday, May 14, 1993, a young Native American from near the Four Corners region of New Mexico had just been admitted into the emergency room at Gallup Indian Medical Center. His chest X-rays showed a white-out in his lungs, which had filled with fluid.

Dr. Bruce Tempest, chief of medicine at the hospital and a commissioned officer with the U.S. Public Health Service (Indian Health Service), studied the film and tried to ascertain why this strong, otherwise healthy individual lay in shock so close to death. Little did he know that as he looked for answers, he’d find himself at the beginning of a mysterious epidemic soon to become a household name around the world: hantavirus.

As headlines blared fears of a new disease that might even be an escaped bio-weapon, scientists at universities and public health organizations raced the clock to learn more about the virus and from where it came. Robert Baker, a Horn Professor of Biology at Texas Tech University, had a feeling some answers may lie in the tissue library of the Natural Science Research Laboratory (NSRL) at the museum of Texas Tech.

That was 20 years ago before myriad pieces of an intricate puzzle gave us a clear view of how the disease suddenly leaped onto the scene. Tissue samples from Texas Tech showed the virus was not new to the area. The Four Corners region adapted to the “new” threat that really was there all along. And people like Robert Bradley, a professor of biology and curator of mammalogy at the NSRL, use the skills, knowledge and technological advancements that came during and after hantavirus to see what else might be brewing in our own back yards.

Read more below.

Texas Tech Research Plays Key Role in Identifying Disease

It still hurts some people in the Four Corners area to think about the hantavirus. A group of young, healthy people died. Families lost members. Because the virus attacked more Native Americans, racial issues swirled and people were stigmatized and labeled.

Click here for the full story.

Staying Prepared for the Next Possible Outbreak

Since the initial outbreak and the public health education that followed, people living in the Southwest have learned to be careful around rodent droppings. That’s not to say that cases don’t still occur.

Click here for the full story.

Houdini software also is offered in the 3-D Animation Lab and via 3-D Lab remote access.

The gift is a culmination of a four-year relationship with Side Effects Software, said David Bennett, lab administrator.

“We are thrilled to be able to offer the highest quality scientific visualization software to our users,” Bennett said. “This allows us to continue to raise the bar in offering cutting-edge technology at the library.”

Donald Dyal, dean of Texas Tech Libraries, said the generous software donation provides yet another tool to make accessing information easier.

“We are pleased to offer these state-of-the-art 3-D animation tools to our ever-growing arsenal of electronic resources such as e-journals, databases and e-books,” he said.

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The grant will help educate instructors about teaching children with sensory impairments and autism.

Children with sensory impairments have unique learning needs, as do students with autism. Until fairly recently, very little was known about teaching children with both sensory impairments and autism. The Texas Tech University Virginia Murray Sowell Center for Research and Education in Sensory Disabilities is changing that by training teachers in high-need areas of the country.

In the fall of 2011, three Sowell Center professors in Texas Tech’s College of Education received notification of a $1.25 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs to fund Project SASI: Students with Autism and Sensory Impairments, Addressing the Personnel Shortages of Rural, Remote, and High-Need Areas.

Nora Griffin-Shirley, Rona Pogrund and Roseanna Davidson are co-principal investigators and directors of the project.

“The purpose of this project is to help alleviate the shortage of teachers trained in the areas of visual impairment, deafness, deafblindness, and orientation and mobility, as well as to provide trained teachers who deal with more than one diagnosis of autism and other sensory impairments,” Griffin-Shirley said. “These professional teachers are acutely needed in the rural, remote and high-need areas in Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Texas and Wyoming.”

Griffin-Shirley

By the end of the five years, 40 effective teachers will be prepared by this grant to work in these needy areas, Griffin-Shirley said. The program is a hybrid model that uses distance education, face-to-face instruction and local support to prepare teachers to work with the types of students who have sensory impairments from birth and for those who are born with both sensory impairments and autism.

Teachers completing the program earn a graduate school certificate in sensory impairments and autism as well as a certification in one of four major areas: teacher of students with visual impairments, teacher of students who are deaf or hard of hearing, teacher of students with deafblindness, and orientation and mobility specialist.

Shelby Gill is employed by the Campbell County School District in Gillette, Wyo., and teaches Junior Kindergarten. She has been teaching for 10 years, with the majority of that time spent teaching high-needs special education for both Crook County School District in Sundance, Wyo. and Campbell County School District.

“The program has helped prepare me in my teaching by providing me with the knowledge and tools to use with some of my wheelchair-bound students,” Gill said. “I had a student just learning to be mobile in his wheelchair, but he had not had formal training in mobility training. I have found the program to provide lots of great information to help him increase his independence.”

Davidson

Gill said the program has been very easy to access and the grant aspect has streamlined the process as well.

“I find it amazing that they can help with all the costs of the program. My travel, books and classes have all been covered by the grant, which is the only way I would have been able to complete the program. It has been a very rewarding learning experience for me and I look forward to working in the orientation and mobility field upon completion of the program.”

Building on Success

The program itself collaborates with states the Sowell Center already has partnered with previously on another completed federal grant, “Children with Sensory Impairments” on which Roseanna Davidson was the sole principal investigator, according to Griffin-Shirley.

“Project SASI is built on those efforts with individual states and state contacts they’ve had before in the area of sensory impairments. Generally these states don’t have any of our personnel preparation programs offered through their university system or private universities in their state, or they may have one unique program but not the other three, or two unique programs without the other two.”

The major objective, she said, is to develop memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with the states departments of education in the six states involved, to provide the personnel needed for that state in one, if not all four areas, using Texas Tech as the personnel preparation program.

Pogrund

There are 19 students in the first cohort of candidates, and the states have begun recruiting for the second cohort. Every state will advertise and recruit for the program in their state and will select recommendations from the pool of applicants. The Sowell Center’s faculty will evaluate each recommended candidate and choose the next cohort that will start in January 2014.

Madonna Hammer, a teacher at Riverton High School in Riverton, Wyo., thinks the SASI program is wonderful in that it provides funding and opportunity.

“It helps to prepare for the area in which one wishes to add a certification, if that is your goal, or for a Master’s degree,” she said. “I would recommend most of the classes in this program to those who wish to gain knowledge and experience working with individuals with visual impairments as well as those who have additional disabilities.”

Each of the three principal investigators heads a program or two. Griffin-Shirley coordinates the Orientation & Mobility Specialist program, Pogrund oversees the Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments program and Davidson heads up the Deafblind program and the Deaf Education program.

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Texas Tech Biology Lab Helps “Save the Frogs”

Amphibians are disappearing due to pollution, infection, climate change and loss of habitat.

To celebrate Save the Frogs Day, a group of 54 volunteers removed 3,200 gallons of trash on April 27 from Lubbock playa lakes in the hope of making the water resources better suited for amphibian breeding and living.
 
Cleaning crews surpassed last year’s amount by 1,200 gallons after removing 76 30-gallon and 71 13-gallon bags of garbage from playas that were strategically chosen because of the presence of amphibians.

The cleanup and educational workshops held at the Science Spectrum were organized by the Bernal Lab at Texas Tech University’s Department of Biological Sciences. Organizers want to raise awareness of the decline of anurans and improve the breeding habitat for frogs and toads on the South Plains.

Ximena (Hee-may-nah) Bernal, an assistant professor who studies frogs and toads in Central America, said removing trash that leaks chemicals can help prevent death and deformities in amphibians as well as discourage other animals that also prey on amphibians.

“I was pleasantly surprised by the great turnout,” she said. “We could not have done it without the support from all the volunteer graduate and undergraduate students from Texas Tech that participated.”

Benjamin Hawkes, a senior undergraduate researcher at the Bernal Lab, volunteered to lead the team at one of the playa lakes. He said he and other volunteers were shocked at the amount of garbage in the playa lakes when they arrived.

Removing trash that leaks chemicals can help prevent death and deformities in amphibians.

“I was surprised at the turnout for Save the Frogs Day,” Hawkes said. “It was great to have so many helping hands. I think we had a great group of people. Many of them couldn’t believe the amount of trash at the playa lake. I heard a number of them talk about how great they felt after helping to clean it up.”

Amphibians are disappearing at an alarming rate around the world, Bernal said. Pollution, infection, climate change and loss of habitat all play a role. In the past 30 years, about 200 amphibian species have vanished, she said, which is equivalent to losing about one species every two months.

“The events are a fun way to make people aware of a very serious problem,” Bernal said. “Frogs are very important to our ecosystem. They eat insects, such as mosquitoes, that carry diseases that harm humans and animals. They, in turn, are food for other creatures. If frogs disappear, then the food chain is disrupted, and this will have negative ramifications on other species.”

By visiting a local school on Thursday and collaborating with The Science Spectrum, lab members held 15 workshops about frogs and toads for more than 300 middle school girls from 24 school districts in Region 17 as well as 80 kindergarteners. Most of these workshops dovetailed into the annual Women in Science Endeavors (WISE) program.

The Science Spectrum is helping educate children through frog and toad workshops.

“The girls were really excited about frogs,” said Sara Candler, a workshop leader and graduate student at the Bernal Lab. “They were shocked and laughed when they learned new things about frogs and some of the unique characteristics of the group and certain species. When the girls learned frogs are declining, they looked surprised and sad. Many of them already were taking part in activities to help the frogs, and others asked more about what they could do to help.”

Priyanka de Silva, also a graduate student in Bernal’s lab, said students learned about the life cycles of frogs and toads and enjoyed watching cane toads race in the locomotor performance trials experiment performed by the girls. Workshop leaders also taught children about nature’s balance and how cane toads are considered an invasive species in certain parts of the world after humans transplanted them from their natural habitat for pest control.

Originally from Central and South America, the warty, four-pound cane toads were brought in 1936 to Australia to control cane beetle populations. Instead of eating the pesky beetles, the toads depleted other native species of animals and reproduced wildly because of the lack of predators. Because of the protective venom glands on their heads, the toads would poison animals that tried to eat them, including people’s pets, and sometimes made humans sick.

“Most of the kids were exited and thrilled about getting to touch cane toads,” de Silva said. “They had so much fun with them. They kept asking why they were called cane toads and why they are consider invasive. Seems they loved them and were not happy to consider them as pests. All of the kids were very upset when they heard that we are losing such big numbers of frog friends. They realized why they are important to the ecosystem.”

Volunteers removed 147 bags of trash from Lubbock playa lakes.

Last year, volunteers removed 58 30-gallon and 22 13-gallon bags of garbage from our target playas. This is the third year the Bernal Lab hosted a Save the Frogs Day event. In 2011, about 700 Texas Tech’s students, faculty and staff set a world record during the Arbor Day celebrations on April 29 for the most people in one place wearing frog masks, according to the World Records Academy.

The first year was a great opportunity to do something fun and jumpstart a grass-roots effort to improve amphibian life on the South Plains, Bernal said.

“This is an important day because it reminds us that we can do small things to help frogs and toads in our area,” she said. “Many people take these animals for granted or ignore how important they are given their role in the food web. This day provides an excellent opportunity to educate the public about the current state of this group of animals. Like the canary in the mine shaft, frogs and toads are excellent bioindicators of the health of ecosystems and the fact that they are not doing well is a worrisome sign of the environmental stress of our planet.”

For more information on threats to frogs: www.savethefrogs.com/threats/index.html.

David D. Perlmutter, new dean of the College of Media and Communication.

Texas Tech University officials announced May 8 that David D. Perlmutter will be the new dean of the College of Media and Communication (CoMC), effective July 1. He replaces Dean Jerry Hudson, who is retiring after 35 years at Texas Tech.

Perlmutter has been the director of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Iowa since 2009.

The announcement came from Provost Bob Smith; the search committee was headed by Stephen Fritz, interim dean of the Honors College.

"I am delighted that Dr. Perlmutter has accepted our offer to join the university as our new dean of Media and Communication," Smith said. "He has a sterling record of contributions as an administrator, scholar, teacher and mentor at the Universities of Iowa and Kansas, and Louisiana State University. His accomplishments as director of the University of Iowa School of Journalism & Mass Communication are particularly noteworthy and should serve him well as he moves to Texas Tech."

Bright Future

Hudson said his successor is an excellent choice to lead the College of Media & Communication.

"Dr. Perlmutter’s academic accomplishments and leadership experience are quite impressive," Hudson said. "I think he will continue to lead the undergraduate and graduate programs toward growth and excellence."

"I am humbled and honored to take the reins from Jerry," Perlmutter said. "In our industry and academic circles he is known as one of the great administrators, as well as a visionary, innovator and bold strategist. He has moved the college forward and brought prominence and respect to the discipline."

Perlmutter has been in higher education 25 years, and both his parents were professors.

"In all that time, I’ve never been on a campus such as Texas Tech, where everyone – from undergraduates to the chancellor – has taken on such an excitement for the future," he said. "Texas Tech is such a can-do place, I’m eager to join you and feel right at home."

Perlmutter previously was a professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, and received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1996. He earned his bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to his research, teaching, and administrative duties at Iowa, he served on the Provost’s Strategic Global Initiatives Council, the Advisory Council for the Office of the Vice President for Strategic Communication, the campus Fulbright Committee and is an International Programs Faculty Fellow as well as a Starch Faculty Fellow in the College of Liberal & Sciences.

Research Oriented

At the University of Kansas he served as associate dean for Graduate Studies and Research and as a member of the University Press of Kansas Editorial Board Committee, and he graduated from the Senior Administrative Fellows Program.

The newly renovated Media and Communication building opened for students this academic year.

At Louisiana State University he was interim associate dean for Graduate Studies and Research, led the political communication track and won two faculty awards including the main campus-wide award for research, teaching and service.

A documentary photographer, he also is the author or editor of nine books on political communication and persuasion.

He has written several dozen research articles for academic journals as well as more than 200 essays for U.S. and international newspapers and magazines such as Campaigns & Elections, Christian Science Monitor, Editor & Publisher, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC.com, Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today. He writes a regular column, "Career Confidential," for the Chronicle of Higher Education and blogs for that publication’s "The Conversation."

In 2010 he was elected to the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication Standing Committee on Research. In 2011 he began a three-year term on the AEJMC Finance Committee.

Perlmutter has been interviewed by most major news networks and newspapers, from the New York Times to CNN, ABC, and The Daily Show. He regularly speaks at industry, academic and government meetings and runs workshops on personal and institutional branding via social media and on promotion and tenure in academia.

20-million-year-old
Dominican fossil amber

Fact or fiction? Stained glass found in medieval cathedrals becomes thicker at the bottom because glass moves over time. For years researchers have had their doubts, now a team at Texas Tech University has further evidence that the glass is not going anywhere.

“Glass transition is related to the performance of materials, whether it is inorganic glass or organic polymers,” said Gregory McKenna, professor of chemical engineering at Texas Tech. “For example, this would be important to people who own a boat made of fiberglass, or fly in an airplane made with epoxy-based composites. Information like that can help predict if that jet will still be flying in 30 years.”

The idea for this research came from a doctoral student’s qualifying exam, McKenna said. He gave Jing Zhao a problem relating to diverging time-scales using polyvinyl acetate, a substance often found in adhesives. Her results were consistent with a lack of divergence – contrary to received thought. So they decided to up the ante by performing similar experiments on a much older, ultra-stable glass.

They chose 20-million-year-old Dominican amber, and together with Whitacre Department Chair and Horn Professor Sindee Simon, Zhao performed calorimetric and stress relaxation experiments on the samples.

McKenna and Zhao

“What we found is that the amber relaxation times did not diverge,” McKenna said. “This result challenges all the classic theories of glass transition behavior.”

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under a grant from the Division of Materials Research, Polymers Program. The process and results were recently published in Nature Communications.

Meanwhile, McKenna has recently acquired additional samples from around the world, including 220-million-year-old Triassic amber from Eugenio Ragazzi, a pharmacology professor at the University of Padova in Italy. The team now has plans to perform similar experiments on the new samples.

“We are in the very early stages,” McKenna said. “However, our research definitely is ‘to be continued.’”

NWI has formed major partnerships to create the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) Facility to focus on wind plant optimization.

Texas Tech University has created the National Wind Institute (NWI) to better support the interdisciplinary research and educational opportunities in wind science, engineering and energy.

The announcement comes today (May 6) from Texas Tech officials at the American Wind Energy Association WINDPOWER 2013 Conference and Exhibition in Chicago.

The institute combines the former Wind Science and Engineering (WiSE) research center and the Texas Wind Energy Institute (TWEI) into one entity. For NWI Director John Schroeder, the move strengthens the already solid interdisciplinary approach to all things wind.

“Wherever wind is involved, there is a strong link between the engineering disciplines and atmospheric science,” he said. “Texas Tech has focused on this link with decades of organic interdisciplinary research and educational activities. Recently, we’ve added economists, lawyers, policy experts, cyber security experts and business professionals to broaden our team even farther.”

All of the university’s wind-related educational opportunities will now fall under the new institute. WiSE created the first doctorate in wind science and engineering. TWEI offers the only Bachelor of Science degree in wind energy as well as a variety of graduate and professional development certificates.

“Texas Tech’s wind research and educational opportunities have always been interdisciplinary,” said Michael San Francisco, interim vice president for research. “The establishment of NWI builds on Texas Tech’s commitment to transdisciplinary research and will provide a better foundation for collaboration and support for our wind efforts.”

Texas Tech has expanded into the wind energy sector, but continues to provide a strong focus on the inherent link between engineering and atmospheric science.

Texas Tech’s wind research dates back to 1970. Following a May 11 tornado that killed 26 people and destroyed large sections of the city, faculty representing the university’s civil engineering department and atmospheric sciences group began to think what could be done to minimize the effects of severe wind events such as tornado’s and hurricanes on lives and structures.

In the past 15 years, Texas Tech has expanded into the wind energy sector, but continued to provide a strong focus on the inherent link between engineering and atmospheric science. Current projects include measuring wind farm complex flows, evaluating turbine-to-turbine interaction, enhancing wind turbine power performance, grid integration, and next-generation energy storage.

NWI has also formed a major partnership with Sandia National Laboratories; Vestas, a leading turbine manufacturer; and Group NIRE, a clean energy company providing project development, finance and consulting services to create the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) Facility to focus on wind plant optimization.

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