All, Big but also kind of micro news is that there’s been a noticeable uptick in donations here at the Bike Center. While I’d love to attribute that to our awesome Bike Abandonment Prevention program, it’s really just been local community members who’re cleaning out their garages--most prominently two white bearded men, not the graduating seniors that we’re hoping to attract.

But that’s a good segue into what our Bike Abandonment Prevention is trying to do: reduce and abate the number of abandoned bikes left by students leaving campus around this time of year. In turn we hope Parking will have to collect fewer bikes that’ll end up in our hands in the end anyway. We’ve got signage and a bike rack set up outside the Bike Center to allow students to donate their bikes and, to incentivize the donation,  in return they can get a water bottle (but the water bottles are only available during open hours). We’ll track how many students are donating and obviously won’t be turning away community donations. There’s already been a social media push and advertising done by Campus Rec to help promote and get the word out!
We’ve got our Fix-a-Flat class this Friday and of course Bike To Work Day on Wednesday. The weather isn’t looking great but we’ll get the dedicated folks come through, I’m sure. Jeff Yockey dropped off the BTWD shirt last week and we’ve been hanging it by the register to showcase the event. Over the upcoming weekend we’ve got our Bike Rodeo event which will also double as a drop-off spot for the Bike Abandonment Prevention program. May is looking busy but it is Bike Month!

Numbers:

Visitors: 73
Sales: $812.50
Memberships: 6 for $180
Bikes (refurb): 3 for $500

Thanks!

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

This project aims to help meet iCAP energy conservation goals and provide a sustainable environment for student based activities. By replacing inefficient and broken single pane windows and non-insulated rusted out doors in the ABE farm offices and shop facility, this project will help achieve the iCAP goals and save funds that be used to promote other activities. The planned outcome is four new insulated walk through doors and seventeen new insulated windows that assist in achieving the goals and provide for a welcoming and efficient learning environment.

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.

As part of the construction of the new Hydrosystems Laboratory, it has become possible to integrate energy piles into the construction. This represents an emerging chance to take the next steps toward geothermal energy on campus by installing energy foundation piles in a large campus building. This project focuses on installation of geothermal heat exchangers within the foundation of the new Hydrosystems Laboratory. Approximately half of the pre-existing building was removed and a larger segment is being built to replace the demolished half. The new portion will be supported by eight drilled shafts. The goal is two use four of these shafts to install energy piles to provide the heating and cooling to the Geotechnical Instructional Laboratory. Data collected during operation of the piles will be used to investigate their heat transfer processes, and the results will be compared with the experimental data and the numerical model will be validated for further use to design new buildings on campus and in the surrounding areas.

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.

The importance of honey bees cannot be understated; they are responsible for pollinating 1/3 of the food supply in the USA, worthy $15B annually. Bees are experiencing steep population declines, and beekeepers nationwide fight against the 4 Ps: parasites, pesticides, pathogens, and poor nutrition to keep their colonies alive and healthy. The Bee Research Facility will use this funding to construct a Sustainable Auxiliary Building enabling expansion of a cutting-edge research system to study the 4 Ps in an unprecedented level of detail. Overwintering colonies indoors will increase colony survival and the sustainability of campus resources, and provide further research opportunities.

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.

The ECEB is projected to achieve net-zero energy shortly, due to its super-efficient design, construction materials, and recently installed solar panels. In order to celebrate and educate about this achievement, a multi-disciplinary team from ECE, Facilities & Services, iSEE, Engineering AV IT, and the School of FAA is coming together to visualize, construct, program and operate a student-focused display about energy production, utilization, and conservation in the ECEB south lobby. Several thousand students pass through this lobby daily, as well as many campus visitors, including the 10,000+ that come during Engineering Open House. The display will engage students and visitors with a touchscreen and information kiosks, show in real time the energy produced by ECEB’s solar panels and solar farm allotment, and demonstrate the efficiencies of ECEB. With the installation of this display, the building will be able to obtain LEED Platinum certification.

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.

“Hyperloop” is a proposed mass transportation method originally theorized by Elon Musk. The system involves a high-speed train, or “pod,” inside of a vacuum tube. In theory, a full-scale design could see pods traveling at up to 700 MPH, making it ideal for inter-city transportation normally taking up to six hours by car, and consuming very little energy. Illini Hyperloop is one of 21 competition teams accepted globally to build a pod for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. Musk’s SpaceX has built a mile-long Hyperloop tube, which can support a near-vacuum. Student-led teams around the world have entered the competition to race their vehicle. Illini Hyperloop has made it into the competition, and hopes to successfully complete construction of their vehicle, ship it to California, and race it on the track. With many students driving or taking buses to and from campus, a Hyperloop could potentially provide quick, inexpensive, and sustainable public transportation, and link Champaign to cities such as Chicago or St. Louis.

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.

To address the need for sustainability education on campus, this projects will digitize key portions of the ENVS 301 course hosted through Coursera. While the process of creating a full online course is intensive, this project will allow for a separate Intro to Sustainability Module to be available free of charge to all students.

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.

Vision Zero is an international organization with the primary goal of promoting zero fatal and severe injury crashes in cities and communities. This is done by implementing practices which go beyond the traditional approaches to safety – by combing data-driven decision making with the incorporation of human error, community input, and implementing a “Safe Systems” approach. This project’s goal is to have zero traffic crashes at UIUC, making it a safer environment for students and staff. It is expected that traffic incidents will increase on campus due to the rise in bike ridership and construction. This project will investigate which Vision Zero principles could be implemented in order to prevent these dangers, resulting in a report that identifies the safety critical point in the transportation network that can be improved according to Vision Zero.

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.