Category: Technology

Wave research sorts earthquakes, blasts, nuclear testing

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 1, 2006

SMU seismologist Brian W. Stump has travelled far and wide to better understand the sound waves and vibrations that occasionally burp and shudder through and around the Earth.

The past several years, Stump, the Claude C. Albritton Jr. Chair in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College, has expanded his research to China and South Korea.

His scientific view also has broadened to include the role played by the atmosphere as well as the Earth in wave propagation, an area of expertise. And serving on the board of directors of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, or IRIS, has transformed him into an advocate for the increasingly collaborative discipline.

Collaboration is one purpose of a joint U.S.-China research project, “Study of Regional Broadband waves from Earthquakes and Man-induced Events in NE China,” north of Beijing where Stump has focused research attention since 2002.

Sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, SMU researchers and those from the China Earthquake Administration’s Institute of Geophysics have deployed a network of 15 seismic instrument stations to record broadband waves radiating 100 to 1,000 kilometers from earthquakes and such man-induced events as mining explosions.

The study sites incorporate areas of frequent earthquake activity, including Haicheng, where the first successful earthquake prediction was made more than 30 years ago. As forecast, a magnitude 7.3 quake struck Haicheng February 4, 1975, whereupon 90 percent of all buildings there collapsed. But “as a result of the prediction and evacuations in the days preceding the event,” Stump recalled in a Dedman College Master Lecture delivered last year, “no lives were lost in a region of three million inhabitants.”

In late July the following year, however, without any warning a magnitude 7.8 quake hit Tangshan, a city southwest across the Gulf of Liaoning from Haicheng. Nearly 250,000 people died.

Brian W. Stump

“Earthquakes in that region aren’t understood very well,” says Stump, who earned his Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. That knowledge deficit has spurred project scientists to better understand the seismicity of that part of the world, with hazard reduction as one ultimate goal. More immediately, however, “the major emphasis is trying to understand the crust and mantle in this area,” he says.

Back to China
Stump returns to China in July for an American Geophysical Union conference in Beijing. Post doctoral fellow Rongmao Zhou will present a paper on the crust and upper mantle at each site. Stump identified Zhou, a 2004 SMU Ph.D. recipient from China, as “the key person” on the project. Zhou says he chose SMU over other universities because of Stump’s personality and reputation.

“He always is supportive of his students and colleagues,” Zhou says. “And he encourages us to explore new ideas and directions.” Although Stump and fellow SMU geophysics professors “make our geophysical program notable to the world,” Zhou says, it isn’t only with peers that Stump shares his enthusiasm.

Rongmao Zhou

Aileen Fisher served as Stump’s teaching assistant last fall for an introductory class, Earthquakes and Volcanoes.

“Even though the students were freshman and sophomore nonmajors, he made the class interesting and versatile,” Fisher says. “I know he spent at least two or three hours a week outside of class talking with some of these intro students who were just interested in the topic.”

Since 1999 another topic of interest to Stump and fellow SMU scientists has been a research project in South Korea, in which some experiments focused skyward. They followed sound waves through the atmosphere with acoustic gauges, as well as vibrations through the ground with seismometers.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and conducted jointly with the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, the project follows the pioneering work of SMU’s Schuler-Foscue Professor of Geological Sciences Eugene Herrin in combining seismic and acoustic observations, Stump says.

“We call it seismo-acoustic analysis,” he says.

The South Korea project initially focused on locating and identifying industrial blasting events because Herrin had discovered that certain wave generators, including explosions and earthquakes, create not only seismic waves but also infrasound waves. Based on that discovery, Herrin was one of the first proponents of using seismo-acoustic analysis to identify mining explosions.

“Every country in the world uses mining explosions every day,” Stump says.

Eugene Herrin

Because blasts, a standard mining practice, are so prevalent, particularly as “small events below magnitude 4,” the ability to distinguish their wave characteristics from those of earthquakes is important, he adds. Equally important is the ability of seismologists to differentiate mining detonations from nuclear weapons tests.

Stump says that he knows of no weapons tests that have occurred since India detonated five underground nuclear explosions in May 1998, and Pakistan six. However, two seismic stations installed and operated by SMU continue in service to the International Monitoring System of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna. One is in the Big Bend area of Texas and one in Nevada.

North Korea’s recent announcement to obtain and build nuclear weapons “makes understanding such a test event even more important,” Stump says.

“Certainly stating that they will develop the weapons and actually testing are two different things,” he says. “This difference drives the continuation of negotiations with the Koreans.”

New projects ahead
Stump, who in 2004 was honored with the yearlong Dedman Family Distinguished Professorship, joined SMU in 1983.

From 1994 to 1996 he assisted in the development of nuclear test-ban verification technology for the Department of Energy at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Stump also served as a Department of Energy technical adviser to the U.S. delegation to disarmament negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland.

That experience made it logical for the Seismological Society of America to tap Stump as one of two experts to convene special gatherings at a significant meeting in San Francisco in April.

Brian W. Stump

For the 100th Anniversary Earthquake Conference Commemorating the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Stump and William R. Walter of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory assembled studies and presenters for the “Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Anniversary Sessions.” The sessions took a retrospective look at nuclear monitoring seismology, the branch of science that came into being when seismographs detected the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in July 1945.

Looking forward, Stump expresses excitement about EarthScope, a more than $200 million initiative to study North America’s crust and mantle as well as the processes that control its earthquakes and volcanoes.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, EarthScope brings together space, geoscience, telecommunications, and other specialists to compile a 3-D portrait below ground using seismometers, global positioning satellite receivers, satellite radar imagery, strain meters, and other collection and analysis instruments.

IRIS is a consortium of university and not-for-profit organizations committed to seismological research. Stump is a member of its board. The consortium manages the data sent in from a network of 100 fixed and 400 transportable EarthScope seismic stations.

“It’s only through collaboration and multiple participants that EarthScope is able to be accomplished,” Stump says. “The collaboration is improving the way seismology is being done. This is exciting because it changes the way my profession does business.”

Tags Brian Stump, Dedman College, Eugene Herrin, Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Rongmao Zhou

Energy & Matter Health & Medicine Technology

New durable materials result from silicon polymers

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 1, 2005

David Son uses some of the Earth’s most common building blocks to create complex new materials with potential wide-ranging applications.

Son conducts research on polymers containing silicon. One of the main elements in the Earth’s crust, silicon is the major ingredient in common sand, and is readily available.

“It’s fairly easy and inexpensive to transform silicon into compounds we can manipulate,” says Son, associate professor in SMU’s Department of Chemistry in Dedman College. “And because silicon is an inorganic element, it gives materials great stability against temperature changes and oxidation.”

Silicon-containing polymers might be used to create more heat-resistant and longer-lasting plastic materials than common organic polymers such as polyethylene or PVC, Son says. One example is the silicone ovenware widely available in stores. Pans made of silicon polymers are temperature-safe, naturally nonstick, and so flexible that they can be turned inside out to remove baked goods.

Most polymers are what chemists call the straight-chain type, with each molecule consisting of atoms laid more or less end-to-end. Son’s research focuses on a new class of polymers called dendrimers, also known as “arborols” for their molecular resemblance to trees with many branches.

The dendrimers’ structure gives them many advantages.

“You can dissolve them much more easily in solvents,” Son says. “Because the molecules are shaped like balls, they roll right over each other and don’t get tangled up the way straight-chain polymers do, so you can use them as lubricants.”

Other possible uses include new drugs in which medicines are encapsulated in the dendrimers’ branches, transported to targeted areas of the body, and then stimulated to release medication directly to those sites.

Most recently, Son has begun creating materials that merge metal ions with organic compounds called ligands. Ligands can be as simple as water or as complex as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, or EDTA, a compound commonly used as an anticoagulant in medicine.

Son is especially interested in how nitrogen- and sulfur-based ligands bond with silver, gold, palladium, and platinum, which are elements with well-established catalytic properties. He hopes to create compounds that can be used to improve everything from optics to plastics manufacturing.

Platinum and palladium compounds are used industrially to spark reactions in other materials. Creating better catalysts, Son says, could enable more efficient manufacturing processes, for example, at lower temperatures or with fewer defects.

Son received his Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry from MIT and has conducted research at the Argonne National Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory.

Tags David Son, Dedman College, SMU Department of Chemistry

Health & Medicine Plants & Animals Technology

Jellyfish, squid propulsion aid new “micro” vehicle research

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 1, 2005

The movement of aquatic life can appear inexplicable when viewed through the glass of an aquarium tank.
But Paul Krueger believes the mechanics that jellyfish and squid use to maneuver can be applied to technology in the emerging field of “micro” vehicles.

Krueger, associate professor in the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering‘s Department of Mechanical Engineering, is studying a mechanical system similar to that used by jellyfish and squid to understand pulsatile propulsion and apply it to exotic engineering applications like micropropulsion. Krueger’s research results eventually might propel tiny vehicles — sizes of a centimeter, millimeter or smaller — used in microsurgery, create micro-submarines for undersea caverns exploration, or maneuver small aircraft for military surveillance.

“Small flight-capable or submersible vehicles are of great technological interest because their diminutive size permits increased portability and access to otherwise inaccessible locations,” Krueger says.

Creating new propulsion schemes is “paramount to the design of micro vehicles because traditional propulsion designs, such as propellers and steady jets, become too inefficient at small scales,” he says.

Krueger believes that pulsed jets, consisting of a series of jet pulses with no flow between them, is a promising approach to developing micropropulsion capability. He plans to develop a model system that propels itself using pulsed jets generated by a volume-displacement mechanism. The behavior of this representative vehicle will help reveal how to adapt pulsed jet propulsion for small-scale vehicles.

Krueger’s research is being supported through a five-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation, partially because of its multidisciplinary nature and potential for educating pre-college students.

As part of the research, he is collaborating with a biologist who is an expert on squid biomechanics, enhancing cross-disciplinary efforts between the fields of biology and mechanical engineering.

Krueger also plans to incorporate the study of micropropulsion devices and its applications to biology, marine life, and medical applications into introductory material for mechanical engineering courses.

“Illustrating applications of mechanical engineering in different fields may be a key factor in attracting new students from various backgrounds to study mechanical engineering,” he says.

Krueger joined the SMU Lyle School of Engineering in 2002. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley. Krueger received his Ph.D. in aeronautics in 2001 from the California Institute of Technology.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Paul Krueger