South Dakota Mines has created a new multidisciplinary Center for Sustainable Solutions. The center will be a hub for research and development around sustainability including water quality, emerging contaminants, agriculture, infrastructure, carbon capture, biofuels, bioplastics, environmental stewardship and more.

“As society faces increasingly complex problems, providing sustainable solutions requires integrative partnerships and approaches that build convergence of many disciplines with research and support for stakeholders at all levels,” says Lisa Kunza, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, Biology and Health Sciences and the director of the new center at Mines.

In the last five years leading up to establishing the Center for Sustainable Solutions, there have been nearly 50 faculty and researchers from eight departments on campus participating in the efforts. “As an institution of higher education, it is imperative to have many graduate and undergraduate students trained in the collaborative environment that the Center for Sustainable Solutions provides while tying the innovative efforts to support the needs of the people,” says Kunza.

The center will help serve the needs of a wide range of partners, from assisting the Department of Defense (DoD) in mitigating emerging ...

A team of mechanical and electrical engineering faculty at South Dakota Mines are in the running for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Visionary Interdisciplinary Teams Advancing Learning, (VITAL) Prize. The Mines team is developing a new hands-on learning program for high school students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The project will be fully NSF funded if the team continues to be successful in the coming rounds of the competitive process.

Prasoon Diwakar, Ph.D., an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Mines, is leading the effort. He joined collaborators to install a fully functional scientific lab in the Frost Science Museum and the Ransom Everglades High School, both in Maimi, Fla. These labs allow students to take on real-world science projects and problems they want to tackle in their own communities.

“We have noticed one of the key things left out of traditional STEM education is hands-on real-world experiential learning. One thing kids often ask is, ‘Why should we learn math?’ This is part of what we are tackling with our program,” says Diwakar.

Diwakar has teamed up with his spouse Neha Choudhary, who is an instructor of electrical engineering at Mines, two ed-tech entrepreneurs in Miami, Ted Caplow and Nathalie Manzano, and two K-12 educators from Ransom Everglades High S...

South Dakota Mines and the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas in Lima, Peru, (UPC Peru) were awarded a grant from the 100,000 Strong in the Americas Innovation Fund to build a partnership that includes a student exchange that builds technical, intercultural and soft-skills training that are needed to improve water quality in Peru.

This program will increase student and faculty collaboration, mobility and cross-cultural skills in the U.S. and Peru. It will also hone student skills via a water sanitation project for families who lack water services in the Lima district of Villa María del Triunfo, Peru.

Capstone design student teams and faculty from both universities will work together virtually and in-person on implementation of a fog catcher system that collects water from the air to be used for domestic purposes, irrigation of orchards and the implementation of a waste-water treatment system to be re-used for irrigation. At Mines, multidisciplinary teams of students from chemical engineering, civil and environmental engineering and other departments will be invol...

Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector—the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab)— has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results. South Dakota Mines physicists played an integral role in LZ by creating technology that reduced the amount of background radiation that could skew the experiment’s results. They are continuing to make important contributions by calibrating and analyzing the experiment.

The take home message from this successful startup: “We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab Senior Physicist and past LZ Spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations,” he said.

In a paper posted online, LZ researchers report that with the initial run, LZ is already the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector. LZ Spokesperson Hugh Lippincott of the University of California Santa Barbara said, “We plan to collect about 20 times more data in the coming years, so we’re only getting ...

South Dakota Mines received a $6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to enhance big data processing and astronomical capabilities of the world’s largest neutrino observatory, IceCube, located at the geographic South Pole. The research will attempt to answer a fundamental question that has puzzled scientists for more than a century regarding the origin of subatomic cosmic particles that carry visible energy. 

The four-year project titled “RII Track-2 FEC: The IceCube EPSCoR Initiative (IEI) - IceCube and the Data Revolution” brings together scientists from South Dakota Mines, University of Alabama, University of Alaska Anchorage, University of Delaware, University of Kansas and University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The team of researchers will work to solve challenges facing Multi-Messenger Astronomy (MMA) – this new form of astronomy integrates the various types of signals coming in from outer-space to paint the most-clear picture possible of our universe. The project is funded through NSF EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). EPSCoR’s mission is to advance excellence in science and engineering research and education in its jurisdictions.

“Astronomy has enormous i...

Imagine camouflage that renders a subject almost invisible; prosthetic limbs that look and feel like real appendages; smartphone battery power that’s embedded throughout the thin fabric of your clothing; windows that direct light to different parts of the room throughout the day. All of these ideas and much more may be possible with a new age of material science that is now unfolding. Researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology are learning to manipulate the basic properties of innovative materials to enable revolutionary new products.

“We’re really trying to enhance voxel-level engineering,” says Travis Walker, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at South Dakota Mines.

So, what’s a voxel? In photography, the sharpness of an image depends on the number of pixels per inch. More pixels in an image yield more vivid detail.

Move into three dimensions, and resolution is not determined by pixels, but voxels. Like digital photography, the resolution in 3D printing technology keeps getting better. Today, researchers are working to manipulate single voxel sizes that are smaller than the diameter of a human hair. This effort means very fine and detailed 3D printing.

The next evolution in 3D printing may involve the ability to change the properties of a material, voxel by voxel. Just as many different colored pixels make...

In the past three years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded  $32 million in funding for research led by faculty at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology that expands human understanding of the microbial world. Much of the research focuses on the environment microbes occupy when they attach to surfaces and create what is commonly known as a biofilm.

The broad range of studies on microbes and biofilms, funded by these grants, has a wide potential for applications across many sectors of industry and society including energy generation, new medicines, wastewater purification, agriculture, corrosion resistance, new materials and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The research effort of the newly announced $20 million NSF grant titled “Building on the 2020 Vision: Expanding Research, Education and Innovation in South Dakota” will be led by researchers at SD Mines, SDSU and USD. The funding was awarded through the South Dakota Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (SD EPSCoR) and the South Dakota Board of Regents. The state of South Dakota is providing $4 million in matching funds for the grant. The Governor’s office of Economic Development and Board of Regents are providing $3 million and there is ...

Since the mid-1800s dinosaurs have been a source of fascination and inspiration — from children’s coloring books to Hollywood blockbusters, these extinct animals hold a unique place in the American psyche. The immense popularity of dinosaurs also makes them an excellent conduit for teaching the critical thinking skills needed in basic science and engineering literacy.

Darrin Pagnac, Ph.D., is a South Dakota School of Mines & Technology associate professor of geology specializing in paleontology. His latest work, “Dinosaurs: A Catalyst for Critical Thought,” published by Cambridge University Press, shows that passion for dinosaurs, when properly directed, can trigger interest in science and be used to develop critical thinking skills.

Each spring Pagnac teaches a course called “Dinosaurs,” which attracts a wide range of students from various fields of study. “We have a number of students who get fired up emotionally about dinosaurs,” he says. In this class, Pagnac helps students confront preconceived notions that he calls “Jurassic Park Syndrome.” This is where student’s views of paleontology and sciences are shaped...

An international team of scientists, including researchers at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, have found the first evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles that can travel unhindered for billions of light years from the most extreme environments in the universe to Earth.

Detecting high-energy cosmic neutrinos requires a massive particle detector, and IceCube is by volume the world’s largest. Encompassing a cubic kilometer of deep, pristine ice a mile beneath the surface at the South Pole, the detector is composed of more than 5,000 light sensors arranged in a grid. When a neutrino interacts with the nucleus of an atom, it creates a secondary charged particle, which in turn produces a characteristic cone of blue light that is detected by IceCube and mapped through the detector’s grid of photomultiplier tubes. Because the charged particle along the axis of the light cone stays essentially true to the neutrino’s direction, it gives scientists a path to follow back to the source.

The observations, made by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the U.S. Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station and confirmed by telescopes around the globe and in Earth’s orbit, help resolve a more than a century-o...

At 10:35 a.m. on August 21, 2017, in a field in front of a small Nebraska Panhandle farmhouse, a team consisting of SD Mines students, Black Hills area high school students, teachers and community members, meticulously followed a set of steps they had practiced many times before. Payloads were carefully secured, batteries checked, and scientific instruments turned on and tested. Soon, helium was coursing through a hose from tanks in the back of a pickup truck into an eight-foot-tall balloon laid out on the soft grass.

Above the desolate cornfields and sandhills of northwestern Nebraska the moon was starting its path across the sun–the arc of its shadow racing across the country toward this team. The Great American Eclipse was underway.

The South Dakota Solar Eclipse Balloon Team had been working for two years to prepare for this one sliver in time. Their goal—to launch this balloon at the exact moment to loft the payload to an altitude of about 100,000 feet, under the moon’s shadow, during two minutes of totality. On board were video cameras, a radiation detector, GPS, and other scientific experiments. This project aimed to capture images and data from the eclipse. The radiation detector would help measure the flux of cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere as the moon obscured the sun. The video cameras would capture the circle of the moon’s shadow on the earth. The team designed and built some of ...

South Dakota School of Mines & Technology is helping to ensure highly sensitive underground dark matter experiments are free of radon that could contaminate the results. SD Mines researchers are building a radon mitigation system at SNOLAB in Canada and at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, S.D.

The team, led by Richard Schnee, Ph.D., professor and head of the physics department at SD Mines, is building machines that filter out radon particles to produce ultra-pure air needed for the SuperCDMS experiment in SNOLAB and for the LZ (LUX-ZEPLIN) experiment in SURF.  The team is also helping ensure the parts used to build the experiments are relatively free of radon.

“Our detectors need very low levels of radon,” Schnee says. While the radon levels at the 4850 Level at SURF are safe for humans, they are too high for sensitive experiments like LZ, which go deep underground to escape cosmic radiation, Schnee explains. “We will take regular air from the facility and the systems will reduce the levels by 1,000 times or more.”

The system in SURF will be installed in the...

Teachers in South Dakota now have the chance to work side-by-side with faculty at SD Mines and bring what they learn back to the classroom.

The Sustainable Development-Research Experience for Teachers (SD-RET) program helps integrate new engineering and science technologies into 6-12^th grade classrooms in rural America. The program is thanks to a $543,466 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It gives teachers new tools and resources to improve Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) curriculum aligned with state standards. The grant increases collaboration between South Dakota teachers, industry partners and Mines faculty..

The SD-RET program helps integrate new engineering and science technologies into 6-12^th grade classrooms in rural America. The program is sponsored by a $543,466 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It gives teachers new tools and resources to improve Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) curriculum aligned with state standards. The grant increases collaboration between South Dakota teachers, industry partners and Mines faculty.

“STEM education and research are a significant part of our mission and strategy, and therefore this NSF grant will have a significant impact on future education of South Dakota 6-12^th grade students in scienc...

The South Dakota Space Grant Consortium (SDSGC) has provided nine awards totaling approximately $176,000 in NASA funding to SD Mines and five affiliate members of the Consortium.

The Space Grant Consortium, headquartered at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, is a statewide network of 20 member organizations from education, industry and government. As the link between NASA and the citizens of South Dakota, the Consortium’s mission is to instill the spirit of exploration and discovery in students, educators and the general public, with a special focus on the fields of science, technology, engineering and math that are essential for the development of the nation’s workforce.

One grant of $17,100 was awarded directly to a Mines student, Kari Pulli, a junior in mechanical engineering, as a scholarship for a project titled “Student CO-OP for Aerospace and High-Altitude Technology Development.”  Pulli was selected by officials at Raven-Aerostar for an eight-month student internship at its Sioux Falls facility. This is on top of a previously announced SDSGC grant of $25,000 to SD Mines for a project titled: “Computational Astronomy for Teachers and Their Students.”

In total, nine winning projects were competitively selected from among 15 proposals submitted under the SDSGC’s FY2016 Project Innovati...