Jud Ready first visited Beaverbrook Park for an adopt-a-stream event as a graduate student. When he moved to the northwest Atlanta neighborhood, he got involved with improvement efforts at the park. 

“It was a muddy mess back then. Over time, we added an exercise trail, playgrounds, a gazebo, and ball fields, but we didn't have a place where you could just walk through the woods,” Ready said. The problem? A creek prevented easy passage, and the park lacked a bridge to cross it.

Despite receiving a grant from Park Pride, a nonprofit that helps residents improve their parks, Ready realized it wasn’t nearly enough money to build a bridge over the rushing waters. Then Ready, a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute with a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, learned that one of his colleagues was using decommissioned wind turbine blades for bridges.

For eight years, Russell Gentry, a professor in the School of Architecture and a member of the Re-Wind Network, has explored how to upcycle wind turbine blades into functional infrastructure. Re-Wind, an international organization, has constructed two bridges in Ireland, where wind energy is more prevalent. The Beaverbrook bridge is the first in the U.S., but building it hasn’t been a simple copy-and-paste process from across the Atlantic Ocean.

“It's not recycling because we're not taking the material back to its original state; it's really adaptive reuse,” explained Gentry. “Think of it as the difference between wood and paper. You can take a tree and grind it up finely for paper, but if you leave it in its original form, you have wood. It’s a much more capable material from a structural perspective.” 

Like almost everything in America, the blades are bigger than their European counterparts.  The 15-meter blade weighs around 7,000 pounds, so moving it from its first home in a Colorado wind farm to a Georgia public park was no easy feat. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa, Ready and Gentry established a team of a dozen Georgia Tech students, researchers, and alumni to bring the blade to Beaverbrook Park. 

Cayleigh Nicholson (architecture), Sakshi Kakkad (computing and architecture), who both graduated in 2024, and fourth-year civil engineering student Gabriel Ackall made sure the bridge was engineered well and that it complied with city regulations. Nicholson spent a semester surveying Beaverbrook to determine the best path and placement of the bridge. Kakkad developed software to better understand the geometry of the blade and position it in the bridge. Ackall was involved in the design process, working with the foundation contractor, Cantsink, to calculate stresses and deflections in the BladeBridges.  

“We’ve essentially had to design the entire structural system of the bridge from scratch, as existing building and bridge codes do not have much information about either the composite materials used in wind turbine blades or in adaptive reuse for new construction,” Ackall noted. “We used advanced modeling software combined with the knowledge we’ve gained from over a half dozen years of wind turbine blade testing and prototyping to make the bridge a reality and ensure their safety.” 

Even alumnus Tierson Boutte, CE 2002, who owns the tree company Boutte Tree, helped make the installation possible. “We’re grateful to be able to give back to the community by pruning the trees for the crane to be able to lift the turbine blades,” he said. 

On a sunny day in mid-March, the bridge was installed with a combined crew of 16 from Chappell Construction, led by alumnus  Wade Chappell, IE  2000; Williams Erection Company, owned by alumnus Art Williams, CE 1983; and ironworkers from Local 387. Finally, with a little help from an unusual source, a neighborhood can fully enjoy its park.

Video by Maxwell Guberman 
Photos by Allison Carter

Pioneering a new recycling approach led to a big win for Re-Wind USA, a Georgia Tech research team led by Russell Gentry. The team has won the first phase of the Department of Energy's Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize, receiving $75,000 and an invitation to compete in the final phase.

"Our innovation for end-of-service wind turbine blades is both simple and elegant – at its core, our technology captures all the embodied energy in the composite materials in the blade," said Gentry, professor in the School of Architecture.

"The Re-Wind Network has pioneered structural recycling, the only of a number of competing technologies that upcycles the material of the blade and preserves the embodied energy from manufacturing," Gentry said.

Pioneering a new recycling approach led to a big win for Re-Wind USA, a Georgia Tech research team led by Russell Gentry. The team has won the first phase of the Department of Energy's Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize, receiving $75,000 and an invitation to compete in the final phase.

"Our innovation for end-of-service wind turbine blades is both simple and elegant – at its core, our technology captures all the embodied energy in the composite materials in the blade," said Gentry, professor in the School of Architecture.

"The Re-Wind Network has pioneered structural recycling, the only of a number of competing technologies that upcycles the material of the blade and preserves the embodied energy from manufacturing," Gentry said.

"Little additional energy is used to remanufacture the blade and the life of the blade, typically 20 years, is extended at least 50 years. This is a win-win solution from an environmental and economic perspective."

Other methods for dealing with decommissioned wind blades involve mechanical grinding and landfilling of subsequent waste, an expensive and energy-intensive process, he said.

Team members include Gentry, Sakshi Kakkad, Cayleigh Nicholson, Mehmet Bermek, and Larry Bank, from the School of Architecture; Gabriel Ackall, Yulizza Henao, and Aeva Silverman, from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering;  and Eric Johansen, a business consultant from Fiberglass Trusses Inc.

The team is part of the Re-Wind Network, a multinational research and development network which develops large-scale infrastructure projects from decommissioned wind turbine blades. 

Re-Wind's pedestrian bridges, known as BladeBridges, have already captured media attention. Two more BladeBridges are expected in Atlanta in 2024, Gentry said. Re-Wind has also developed, prototyped, and tested transmission poles made from blade segments. The team's other proposals include culverts, barriers, and floats.

A new eBook, "Climate Change and the Design of the Built Environment," written by Michael Gamble, Academic and Research Council Chair at the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design and associate professor in the College of Design at Georgia Tech is now available!

Written as a series of dialogues with leaders from various disciplines, the book positions design as an essential component of entrepreneurial approaches which explore the sociocultural and eco-political dimensions of climate change.  Economist, Architects, Planners, Sociologist, Lawyers, Policy Makers, Landscape Architects, and MBA’s contribute to a spirited discussion around climate change and design.

Global climate change has already resulted in a wide range of impacts across every region of the country. Many sectors of the economy are expected to grow related to climate and health in the coming decades.  The design and retrofit of buildings, infrastructure and cities will be a major part of future efforts.  

All interviews are Kendeda Building based on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus with experts participating from around the world.

At first glance, the new maker space opening in the Kendeda Living Building for Innovative Sustainable Design might look like many others. However, the space, named EcoMake, has some important differences. Because it is housed in the Kendeda Building, there are strict standards for what types of materials and equipment can be used there in order to maintain its Living Building Certification. For example, you will find several 3-D printers there, like almost all maker spaces, but the plastic filament used in them is made from recycled plastic, perhaps recycled on-site with equipment in the lab itself.

Some might regard such restrictions as too limiting to their creativity or design goals. Viewed another way, this approach opens up a unique set of possibilities. Biologically Inspired and Green Design (BIG-D) is a field of study (sometimes referred to by different names, like “biomimicry”) that has demonstrated a lot of promise in the past few decades. This approach aims to translate the billions of years of knowledge and design wisdom embodied in our biological world into innovative green products. However, no matter how green the design of a product, they are often manufactured with traditional processes with limited consideration for energy, toxicity, water, or material use. Having a lab like EcoMake will help to usher in the field of study of Biologically Inspired and Green Manufacturing (BIG-M). BIG-M will require knowledge, equipment, and resources that are much different than traditional fabrication methods. Like natural systems, this new facility will operate within the means of nature, using no more energy or water than can be generated from its geometric footprint, and producing no more waste than it can assimilate on site.

EcoMake has the following tools and equipment (so far):

• 8 - Prusa I3S+ 3-D Printers
• 5 - Ender 3 Pro 3-D Printers
• EinScan-SP 3-D Object Scanner
• Mark-10 ESM303 Mechanical Tester
• 300-X Digital Microscope
• 3Devo Filament Extruder
• Shini SG-16N Plastic Granulator
• Plastic Chip Dryer
• Singer Heavy Duty 4423 Sewing Machine
• Complement of Standard Fabric Crafting Equipment

EcoMake, the bio-inspired maker space will be open to students from all disciplines. It is supported by the Colleges of Design, Engineering, and Biology, and the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. Contact Michael Gamble for more information.

The Georgia Tech student team, "English Avenue Yellow Jackets", is the 2022 Design Challenge Residential Division Grand Winner for the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon. They also took home first place in the contest's new Retrofit Housing division. Their winning entry retrofitted a 102-year-old house in Atlanta's English Avenue neighborhood.

"The target was to retrofit an existing house to net zero," Aayushi Mody, the team lead said. "And, well, we exceeded the target by making it net positive. The house basically generates more energy than it utilizes." But, Mody explained, that's just the beginning.

In addition to a net positive retrofit, the English Avenue Yellow Jackets provided solutions for rainwater harvesting and graywater reuse, a financial model that included land trust subsidies, and an additional 60 years' worth of projected weather data that proved the house would stay net positive even in cases of extreme weather.

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The simplicity and elegance of origami, an ancient Japanese art form, has motivated researchers to explore its application in the world of materials. 

New research from an interdisciplinary team, including Northwestern University’s Horacio Espinosa and Sridhar Krishnaswamy and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Glaucio Paulino, aims to advance the creation and understanding of such folded structures for applications ranging from soft robotics to medical devices to energy harvesters.

Inspired by origami, mechanical metamaterials — artificial structures with mechanical properties defined by their structure rather than their composition — have gained considerable attention because of their potential to yield deployable and highly tunable structures and materials. 

What wasn’t known was which structures integrate shape recoverability, pronounced directional mechanical properties, and reversible auxeticity — meaning their lateral dimensions can increase and then decrease when progressively squeezed. Though some 3D origami structures have been produced through additive manufacturing, achieving the folding properties displayed in ideal paper origami remained a challenge. 

Using nanoscale effects for an origami design, the team of researchers from Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering sought to answer that question. They produced small, 3D, origami-built metamaterials, successfully retaining the best properties without resorting to artifacts to enable folding. 

“The created structures constitute the smallest fabricated origami architected metamaterials exhibiting an unprecedented combination of mechanical properties,” said Espinosa, the James and Nancy J. Farley Professor of Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship and professor of mechanical engineering and (by courtesy) biomedical engineering and civil and environmental engineering. 

“Our work demonstrated that rational design of metamaterials, with a large degree of shape recoverability and direction-dependent stiffness and deformation, is possible using origami designs, and that origami foldability enables a state where the material initially expands and subsequently contracts laterally (reversible auxeticity),” added Espinosa, who serves as director of Northwestern’s theoretical and applied mechanics graduate program. “Such properties promise to influence a number of applications across a wide range of fields encompassing the nano-, micro-, and macro-scales, leveraging the intrinsic scalability of origami assemblies.”

“Guided by geometry, the scaling and miniaturization of the origami metamaterial are exciting in itself and by the unprecedented multifunctionality that it naturally enables,” said Paulino, the Raymond Allen Jones Chair in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“Only an interdisciplinary effort combining origami design, 3D laser printing with nanoscale resolution, and in situ electron microscopy mechanical testing could reveal the unprecedented combination of properties our work demonstrated and their potential impact on future applications,” added Paulino, who contributed to establishing the National Science Foundation Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program named ODISSEI (Origami Design for Integration of Self-assembling Systems for Engineering Innovation).

“Just like nature has architected a wide range of structures using just a few material systems, origami allows us to engineer resilient structural components with distinct physical properties along different directions,” said Krishnaswamy, professor of mechanical engineering. 

“We can envision origami-based soft microrobots that are stiff along some directions to carry payloads while maintaining other degrees of flexibility for motion. Origami-metamaterials that exploit reversible auxeticity and large deformation can lead to multifunctional applications ranging from deployable microsurgical instruments and medical devices to energy steering and harvesting,” added Krishnaswamy, the director of Northwestern’s Center for Smart Structures and Materials.

The study presents new avenues to be explored long term, Espinosa said.

“There are a number of possibilities,” he said. “One is the fabrication of origami structures with ceramic and metallic materials, while preserving nanoscale dimensions, to exploit size effects in the mechanical response of the structures leading to superior energy dissipation per unit volume and mass. Another is the use of piezoelectric polymers, which can result in energy harvesters that can drive sensing modalities or power microsurgical tools.”

The research, “Folding at the Microscale: Enabling Multifunctional 3D Origami-Architected Metamaterials” was published in the journal Small on July 27. Along with Espinosa, Krishnaswamy, and Paulino, coauthors include Northwestern’s Nicolas A. Alderete, Zhaowen Lin, and Heming Wei, and Larissa S. Novelino from Georgia Tech.

The research was supported by the Army Research Office (award W911NF1220022), a Multi-University Research Initiative through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR-FA9550-15-1-0009), the Office of Naval Research (grants N00014-15-1-2935 and N00014-16-1-3021), and the National Science Foundation (grant No. 1538830). Nicolas Alderete received a fellowship from the Argentinian Roberto Rocca Education Program and Larisa Novelino from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (project 235104/2014-0).

Writer: Brian Sandalow, Northwestern University

Georgia Tech Arts is still seeking projects for the 2021 ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian
Creativity and Innovation Festival in Washington, DC. All Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff are invited to apply by May 1, 2020.

Even if you do not have a finished project exploring the intersection of science,
engineering, art, design, and technology, we encourage you to speak with Es
Famojure at esther.famojure@arts.gatech.edu about your concepts.

Learn about Georgia Tech's 2019 participants for some inspiration.

The festival brings together all institutions included in the Atlantic Coast Conference to
celebrate creativity and innovation with a specific focus on science, engineering, arts, and
design. It will be held April 9 -11, 2021 at the Smithsonian National Museum of American
History.

Submit your project for consideration by May 1, 2020 to be considered.

LEARN MORE & APPLY