UMass Extension Inaugurates New Program in Energy

The UMass Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (CAFE) recently showcased BCT faculty member Ben Weil's efforts with the Massachusetts Energy Extension Initiative (MAEEI), a program funded by a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources. You can read more about it here: http://ag.umass.edu/news-events/highlights/umass-extension-inaugurates-new-program-in-energy  ...
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BCT’s Peggi Clouston Speaks About “Emerging Technologies in Wood and Bio-Based Building Products”

The concluding talk of this semester's impromptu BCT lecture series “Building with Wood” was delivered November 21 by our very own Dr. Peggi Clouston. After covering the many benefits of wood and other bio-based materials (such as bamboo), she illustrated several of her research projects that featured mainly composite applications of these materials in structures. Her talk followed Nic Clark from KLH. Dr. Clouston teaches courses in structural wood design, material mechanics and bio-based composites to students of construction technology, architecture, and engineering. Her research focuses on modeling and characterizing the probabilistic mechanical behavior of structural bio-based composite materials as well as innovative wood products and systems. Links: Presentation (available soon) Bio-Based Building website Dr. Clouston's faculty page ...
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Weil and Clouston Participate in NSF Grant to Fund Sustainable Agriculture, Clean Energy Partnership with HCC, Hampshire

The National Science Foundation has awarded an $810,000 grant to Holyoke Community College, in partnership with UMass Amherst and Hampshire College, to create collaborative programs combining clean energy studies with sustainable agriculture and share new resources that will benefit students at all three schools. The grant supports a series of joint courses, the first of which will begin in the summer of 2015. Professors Peggi Clouston and Ben Weil of the Environental Conservation Department are working with John Gerber, professor of sustainable food and farming in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, to create course content relating to agricultural structures, energy efficiency, and on-farm renewable energy. The grant will also fund new clean energy and agriculture equipment that will be used by students and researchers from all three schools, including a micro-farm greenhouse demonstration and training facility at the Agricultural Learning Center on North Pleasant Street. The micro-farm greenhouse demonstration and training facility will be managed by Amanda Brown and the UMass student...
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New Publication: “A framework for integrated urban metabolism analysis tool (IUMAT)”

Abstract: IUMAT (Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool) is a system-based sustainability analysis tool. It quantifies and aggregates the social, economic and environmental capitals of urban activity in an integrated framework focusing on the metabolic flows of urban development. This paper builds on previous work on urban metabolism and advances an analytical framework that defines how the consumption of resources and resulting environmental impacts are calculated as indices of sustainability in an urban region. The benefits of integrated urban modeling using the proposed framework as well as the data sources are detailed. The underlying analytical framework for the proposed tool applies the dynamics of choice, time, and scale towards dynamically interpreting demographic and economic factors. IUMAT's calculative modules for land cover, transportation, and energy/water/resource use are described as well as the modality of connections between the modules. Nariman Mostafavi, Mohamad Farzinmoghadam, Simi Hoque, A framework for integrated urban metabolism analysis tool (IUMAT), Building and Environment, Volume 82, December 2014, Pages 702-712, ISSN 0360-1323,...
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Clouston co-authors book chapter on laminated bio-based composites

Clouston co-authors book chapter on laminated bio-based composites

A recently published book titled "Bio-Based Composites for High-Performance Materials: From Strategy to Industrial Application" (published by CRC press) includes a chapter on "Characterization and Strength Modeling of Laminated Bio-Based Composites", which was co-authored by BCT-faculty Peggi L. Clouston, Sanjay R. Arwade, and Alireza Amini. See below for an excerpt on Google Books: Link: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781482214482...
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