Pitt faculty receive awards to explore next-generation technologies

Lisa Weiland will undertake a twofold effort to help sustainable energy gain a foothold in Western Pennsylvania by implementing self-powered materials into an ongoing project to power the town of Vandergrift in Westmoreland County with hydrokinetic power. The Vandergrift project, based in the Swanson School's Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, will harness the Kiskiminetas River and help power the town’s main business district with free, clean-source electricity using micro-hydro generators. Because the river—and thus the generator—is small, Weiland will investigate a potential power harvesting method based on electromechanical materials that would generate power as the river’s current moves over them. One material Weiland will focus on are known as ionomers. Ionomers have been tested for such uses as self-powered sensors in bridges and for monitoring blood flow in patients at risk for arterial blockage; as the sensors move from vibrations or fluid flow they would simultaneously send out an electric data signal and recharge themselves. But ionomers have not yet been applied to such high-power devices as generators because of a concern that electrical output and fragility increase in tandem. As part of her CAREER project, Weiland will work on constructing more robust ionomers that can produce more power without becoming too delicate. The education component of her project includes working with civic and business leaders in Vandergrift—and eventually other cities—to develop tailored plans for becoming more efficient producers and consumers of energy and goods.

As technologies become more compact and powerful, the microprocessors within them become more prone to overheating, leading to poor performance, reduced reliability, and shorter lifetimes. Jun Yang will investigate ways of controlling temperature by proactively scheduling workloads among different processing cores—which perform specific tasks within a processor—of today’s multicore processors. Current processors adopt a reactive temperature control by decreasing power flow within the entire processor—even if only one core overheats. Yang’s technique instead prevents overheating by swapping a high-stress task in an overheating core with a low-stress task from a cooler core. This approach would diminish the occurrence of hotspots and maintain a temperature at which the processor can function with maximum performance and reliability. Yang focuses her research on computer architecture particularly power and thermal aware design, energy efficiency, and chip multiprocessor designs.