LEXINGTON, KY - The event "ukTech10," billed as a gallery of innovations, was held downtown recently to showcase some of the commercially marketable research projects currently underway on the campus of the University of Kentucky.
The projects on display varied widely, but all offer significant potential return in terms of financial gain, saving money, and/or saving lives. And to the city's economic development professionals, they represent chapters of a new narrative about a metamorphosis that is beginning to occur in Lexington's economy and culture.
Fred Payne, of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, teamed with Chris Thompson, Regulatory Specialist in the College of Agriculture, to create a wireless transportation system that tracks milk in transit 24-7. Their system of continuous monitoring thwarts terrorists or anyone who would interfere with the safety of the milk supply.
"This is the first system for a [milk transport] tanker that was designed from the ground up," Payne explained. The system can be retrofitted into existing milk tankers, a marketing advantage.
After pointing out the electronic locks on the top dome and back door of a "thermos" tanker that holds 6,000 gallons of chilled milk, Payne added that the barcode system monitors the identity of the driver, the truck, the dairy farm, and the bulk milk collecting station.
Whenever the truck's electronic locks are opened, the monitoring station will know when and by whom, as well as when samples are drawn from the milk. A GPS keeps constant watch over the truck's location.
With 55,000 dairy farms and 15,000 milk tanker trucks the U.S. market for this system is huge. "It will save $14,000 per truck per year and the cost of the entire system is less than that," Payne said.
He noted that their project was developed with lots of input from dairy farmers, milk haulers, and milk marketing agency personnel. "It was presented to over 40 groups in the industry and tried out at a dairy in Winchester and also in New York State."
Thompson said that the system brings "a revolutionary change going from paper to completely computerizing. The truck driver's hassle with paperwork is eliminated."
Development of the system was funded initially by the national Institute for Hometown Security in Somerset. Payne said that "within the next year we hope to obtain funds to commercialize the system or look at licensing it."
Research by Kozo Saito, Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of research for Technology Development, will save lives of firefighters and residents in forests and cities.
"That is motivation to work harder, to save lives," Saito said.
His research came out of studying the aftermath of a 1923 earthquake in Tokyo, Japan. 38,000 people took refuge in an open grassy area, only to die in 20 minutes as a firestorm swirled over them.
More than 50 years later, Saito, then a graduate student at a university in Japan, sought to learn why the tragedy happened. He has been studying these "fire tornadoes" that spin from two sides ever since.
What Saito has learned has been written into training manuals for firefighters. There is also an industrial use where this type of fire can be put to good use: it melts aluminum faster in huge furnaces.
Mark Crocker, Biofuels Research Group, Center for Applied Energy Research, is growing a special kind of algae by using carbon dioxide and heat from coal-fired power plants. His system will remove CO2 from a distillery or any type of plant that generates it.
Since the Environmental Protection Agency is tightening regulations to require more removal of CO2, there is a significant market for the photobioreaction process, particularly with utility plants. The leftover algae, dried, can also be used as a biofuel.
"Our primary goal is to get rid of CO2. Making fuel is secondary," Crocker said.
Rodney Andrews, of CAER, said that while Crocker's team is using a coal-fired burner to simulate a power plant now as the process is being fine-tuned, "our next step will be to go to a utility plant to try it out."
Lawrence Hassebrook and his team-UK staff engineer Walter Lundby and graduate student Eli Crane-are working on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Their equipment can quickly capture three-dimensional images of fingerprints, faces, just about any object. Using a structured light scanner is less expensive than current methods of obtaining a 3-D image.
Looking through the 3-D scanner makes flat photographs of fingerprints look like newly-plowed fields, with rows of soil piled on the sides of deep furrows. When this much detail is clearly visible there's no confusion about whose fingerprint is whose.
When images are blurred or similar, the extra (third) dimension makes it much easier to distinguish items from each other. In the case of security, the innocent person won't be detained while the criminal or terrorist is much less likely to elude capture or be passed through security checkpoints.
Bill Gregory, Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments in the College of Engineering, has developed a scalable image search engine that quickly identifies two dimensional images using a conventional camera and a personal computer. One use of this software is to check quickly for copyright infringement of a design.
By using an inline filter and chelator, Robert Yokel, College of Pharmacy, has developed a method for removing aluminum contaminants from intravenous feedings given to premature babies.
Research by Claire Sanger, Department of Plastic Surgery in the College of Medicine, is also helping babies. Putting babies to sleep on their backs has greatly reduced the number of deaths by SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), but cases of Positional Plagiocephaly (Flat Head Syndrome) have increased.
Sanger is working to raise awareness among parents and caretakers that this deformity can be prevented by turning the baby's head to one side. For babies who have developed the condition, she has created a helmet that will gradually return their heads to normal shape.
With just a few projects, ukTech10 demonstrated the scope of research underway at a university functioning under a legislative mandate to arrive among the nation's Top 20 research institutions by 2020 - a goal made difficult by said same legislature's ongoing regimen of cuts in education funding, not to mention a weak economy.
But, as the economy improves it is hoped that many of these projects will attract the attention of the venture capital and investment communities, creating new businesses and the new jobs that come with them.