The Campus Bike Center held Fix-a-flat classes every week on Fridays from March 29, 2019 (from 11 am - 12 pm) till the end of semester (May 3, 2019).

Description for the Fix-a-Flat class:
“Tired of getting flat tires on your bike? Come to this 1 hour informational hands-on class to learn how to solve one of the most common bicycle repair problems! We’ll cover the basics of removing a wheel and tire, replacing the tube, and reinstalling the wheel on the bicycle. All tools and parts will be provided.”

The row crops that dominate Midwestern agriculture, corn and soybeans, are productive but also have a number of negative environmental impacts, such as soil erosion, loss of soil carbon, nitrate leaching, and greenhouse gas production. In order to combat these impacts of traditional Midwestern agriculture, this team established an “Agroforestry for Food” trial to experiment with systems that use multiple, perennial crops to produce foods with better environmental benefits and ecosystem services. This 12-hectare experimental plot is located at the Energy Farm on South Race Street, where it can produce a large amount of food and critical insights into the development of stable, productive cropping systems. It is entering its fifth growing season, but due to insufficient irrigation in past seasons, development of the plants has been slowed. This funding will allow for the installation of irrigation to improve crop growth and development, earlier and more robust harvests, and speed up the progress of the trial.

The second and third floors of the Art & Design building house the most-used student workspaces. Currently, these hallways (which are heavily used for the display and critique of student artwork) have bare fluorescent bulbs and manual switches. This project will allow for the replacement of the ceiling with a suspended ceiling system and integrated edge-lit LED flat panel lights, with occupancy sensor light controls. Additional funds will be supplied by Art & Design and award funds from the Energy Conservation Incentive Program.

Construction will begin in June on the University of Illinois Campus Instructional Facility (CIF), which will be the first public-private partnership on the UIUC campus and the first geothermal system project of its size and scale. This geothermal installation will be scalable, allowing for expansion to other buildings on the Bardeen Quad. The system will reduce overall usage of other energy sources and provide a form of resiliency when parts of the campus energy system go offline, as well as reduce dependence on the Abbott Power Plant. It will also provide a prime opportunity to seek publicity and coverage to promote the UI as a leader of sustainability. Its completion will be a milestone for the university’s goal of carbon neutrality and will be the first to use this forward looking design while transitioning the campus towards a cleaner tomorrow.

This project will retrofit drying ovens and associated workspace to utilize renewable energy heat from an existing biomass boiler. The College of ACES is financially supporting the construction of a sample processing room to better utilize the existing drying over assets at the Energy Farm, for which the current energy source is propane. The biomass boiler, installed in 2017, has proven to be functional and capable of decreasing carbon. Right now, the primary structure it heats is a greenhouse, from October to April each year. By expanding the months of operation and utilizing excess capacity, an increased value and return on investment will be realized.

The Illini Union Illini Rooms (I-Rooms) are currently using compact fluorescent lighting fixtures, which are low efficiency, contain mercury, and are expensive to maintain. This project will replace all 72 of these fixtures with LED alternatives. It will increase energy conservation efforts in the Union and reduce its overall carbon footprint. Doing so will also advance iCAP objectives and increase awareness of wasteful energy consumption.

This project will replace the outdated incandescent lighting systems in the museum’s primary gallery for special exhibitions. The current system was installed in 1968 and is still in use. The full replacement will encompass 165 – 395 fixtures. Aside from being wasteful of energy, the current system is also increasingly difficult to maintain and presents several safety concerns. This LED conversion is just one component of the museum’s long-term plan for energy savings and sustainability, which will eventually include further LED conversion and a roof replacement.

Just like any other lab or research facility, the South Farms are a valuable asset to the University of Illinois. In order to have the biggest impact on research, the best equipment and data generation techniques are necessary. This allows the university to practice applicable research that improves the quality of human life. As such, this project will fund the purchase of a combine draper head for the South Farms that will increase productivity, diversify available crops for harvest, and elevate the South Farms to be on par with current farming techniques. All researchers on the South Farms, from small grain researchers to cover crop researchers, will benefit from access to this technology due to the higher rates of harvest, cover crop growth, and environmental return this draper head will generate.

The primary goal of this project is to create an intuitive and complete open-source loT solution for both research and general use. This system will make data collection as easy as placing sensors where they are needed and adding them to the system through only a few button clicks, after which the cloud-based platform will take care of everything else. The open-source nature of the project leverages non-proprietary solutions and allows developers to expand the data-collection system to new uses. The more ambitious goal of the project is to bridge the gap between research and application. Users will have an opportunity to share data with any research project and benefit from predictive analytics models derived from researchers’ findings in return. The idea is for this feedback loop it greatly speed up the research process and dramatically cut down the efforts to speed the transition of research outcome into practical benefit.