What Is Green Engineering?

“Green Engineering is the use of advanced measurement and control techniques to design, develop, and improve products and technologies resulting in environmental and economic benefits.”¹ The good news is that, just as environmental issues are becoming more and more critical to humankind, we now have affordable technologies that enable us monitor and manage our (bio-)systems, reduce the greenhouse gases we emit, lower the amount of energy we consume, and thereby reduce our costs while benefiting our planet. Every engineer is becoming a “green engineer” because all of us are now intent on reducing carbon footprints and in saving money by reducing the energy consumption of the products and processes we design and control.

How Is Green Engineering Done?

Today, an increasing number of scientists and engineers are designing complex feedback and control systems that enable them to:

1. Monitor multiple data feeds from a myriad of sensors that detect and capture analog signals (temperature, humidity, pH, gases, chemicals) in real time.

2. Analyze these streams of input in near real time.

3. Correlate the relationships among the inputs to create a dynamic model of a complex system.

4. Take compensating or corrective actions by sending signals to trigger actions based on real-time events, triggers, and thresholds.

What Enabling Technologies Are “Green Engineers” Using?

What makes green engineering easier to do today than ever before are the cost effective and convenient tools we now have that enable us to sense, detect, analyze, monitor, and control multiple parallel processes with great precision at relatively low costs. Here are some core enabling technologies that are commonly used in green engineering applications:

• High-Speed and High-Resolution Measurements. There are literally tens of thousands of different sensors available to measure most real world phenomena. Many of these sensors are inexpensive enough that they can be widely distributed. Most sensors can now transmit their signals and data wirelessly. Their locations can be precisely pinpointed using GPS technology. Their data feeds can be gathered and analyzed remotely using low-cost Internet connections. Today’s sensors are able to gather and to report extremely detailed, high-resolution measurements and send those measurements immediately.

• Advanced Analysis and Signal Processing. As all of this high-speed, high-resolution information arrives, we need to be able to make sense of it, to convert it to engineering measurements, to digitize it, to analyze the data in near real time, and to visualize and understand the patterns that emerge. Advances in software instrumentation now make it straightforward to perform very complex computations on these multiple signal streams as their inputs are being received.

• High-Speed and Advanced Control. As the signals are being processed, it’s now possible to trigger appropriate actions in near real time in order to control or to alter processes with great precision, using a combination of open and closed loop controls, and to monitor the results of the actions taken.

• Embedded System Technology. Computers are now able to be embedded everywhere. Intelligent systems are found in many devices, from cell phones to thermostats to windmills. We no longer have to rely on general-purpose computers to sense, monitor, analyze, and control our environment. Most of the devices we use have computing and communications technology embedded in them.

A Bottoms Up, Globally Distributed Phenomenon

As my research showed, green engineering is taking place all around the globe. Keeping track of all of these initiatives is a daunting task. In fact, it’s kind of like the spread of the Internet. Each engineering team monitors the signals they care about, in the spatial temporal resolution that’s appropriate for the task at hand, and controls the outputs and actions that make sense for their applications. As they do so, they’re collecting large amounts of very granular data in real time. So, for example, the Malaysian engineer I interviewed, Thiru Subramaniam, the CTO from Chiller Energy Management Systems (CEMS), has been monitoring the temperatures on the outside of a dozen buildings in Malaysia and Singapore every 10 seconds for two years. He has watched the ambient temperature increase two degrees over the last two years. He pointed out that someone is probably also monitoring the temperature in the nearby seas. Correlating the ocean temperature and the external building temperatures might be useful.

Taking Advantage of Globally Shared Metadata Frameworks and Mapping

One of the most encouraging aspects about the real-time data being gathered in many green engineering projects—especially those that are related to monitoring the environment—is that many of these initiatives are setting up open frameworks for encoding and sharing the data they are capturing and analyzing. For an example of one such project, see the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network at Gleon.org. This is an informal, grass roots effort by researchers in a variety of academic and research institutions to instrument fresh water lakes around the world in order to be able to monitor them—both as a way to monitor water quality and environmental issues and also to use these lakes as an early warning system for the overall health of our planet.

Using Lakes to Monitor the Health of Our Planet

Thanks to Professor Tom Harmon at the University of California, Merced for letting me highlight his team’s work in this week’s case study. I thought that this particular example of green engineering in action would be of interest to anyone who wants to understand what’s possible using today’s distributed sensor technologies and near real-time modeling.

 

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1) Green engineering definition from John Hanks, VP Product Marketing, National Instruments.

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