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 ...

Wildfire smoke may have a significant impact on the efficiency of solar panels and the overall effort to transition nation’s energy production from fossil fuels to more solar based systems, according to research published by Long Zhao, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at South Dakota Mines and director of the Smart Grid and Energy Research Lab at South Dakota Mines.

Zhao’s work, conducted over the last two years when wildfire smoke blanketed parts of the American West, shows that widespread smoke can reduce the output of individual solar panels by nearly 50% -- even on days when smoke is present at high altitudes and air quality near the ground is not significantly impacted.

“It depends on where you are,” says Zhao. It makes sense that solar energy production is negatively impacted on very smoky days, but Zhao’s team was surprised to see reductions in solar energy output when wildfire smoke was aloft higher in atmosphere. “This makes it harder to quantify days when smoke will impact solar energy production based on air quality monitoring systems we have in place,” he says.  His work will be published in the Journal IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications.

Unlike passing clouds, that can reduce solar energy generation for a short duration, wildfire smoke can...