Clean Energy Systems Laboratory

The Clean Energy laboratory is where students tackle the growing energy and water crises facing the United States and the world. Students tackle problems in sustainable transportation, sustainable buildings, and sustainable water.

Our student design teams develop solar-powered water desalination systems to provide fresh, clean water from seawater or contaminated sources, collect driving data to help reduce traffic, which reduces emissions and energy consumption and monitor experiments in a net-zero building called the ACE Lab, or Adaptable Clean Energy laboratory.

In addition to its role as a classroom laboratory space, the lab is home to the Clean Energy Club, an extracurricular interdisciplinary group that has designed a system to purify drinking water for Haitians as part of Project Haiti. The Aqua Pack, a complete water-purification system housed in a single backpack, was also developed in this lab.

This is one of four labs available to Mechanical Engineering students for research purposes as part of the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering.

Equipment

• Office area with nine PCs, color printer, and office supplies
• Indoor laboratory area (800 square feet) with two PCs, hand tools, and cutting and drilling tools
• Adaptable Clean Energy (ACE) Laboratory that is a 20-foot x 8-foot, net-zero solar powered laboratory
• Outdoor solar laboratory area with 1kW solar PV array and 50-gallon solar thermal water heater and Solar DOME monitoring building with data acquisition PC 
• 2 Enerac M700 portable emissions analyzers from EPA sponsored research
• John Deere XUV855D-S4 Diesel four-seater campus vehicle for mobility experiments
• Vehicle mounted PC, camera, GPS, and inertial measurement unit (IMU) for data collection while driving for deep learning and telemetry experiments
• Biomass materials characterization laboratory equipment
• Seawater desalination test rig
• 2 Reverse osmosis water purifiers for Project Haiti