The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.
As human population continues to grow, the strain on our natural resources will also increase. Basic human needs for water, food, and shelter cannot be met without energy and resource consumption. In fact, approximately 40% of the energy consumption is attributed to housing (i.e., heating and cooling, cooking, waste disposal, entertainment, etc.). Our current practices for supplying these needs with current singular-use technologies are not as efficient as they could be in combination with other technologies. However, the adoption of more efficient technologies is outside the affordability of most of the populations. The primary goal of a planning grant for a Center for Empathetically Engineered Profitable Housing (CEEPH) is to develop the science, engineering, financial, policy-related, and social information required to create homely single-family and multi-tenant housing that are also profitable for their owners. In other words, these housings would generate revenues sufficient to pay the cost of their financing and to provide the owners with an additional income while meeting the design needs for residential use, and home-based businesses. A secondary goal of the CEEPH is to include as diverse a perspective in the research as possible, which will be accomplished through a diverse group of researchers from the collaborating universities as well as stakeholders involved in the planning grant. The planning grant will be crucial to bring together this diverse (in terms of disciplines, gender, race, and backgrounds) group of researchers and stakeholders to developing the ERC activities and management. We envision dwellings that generate surplus electricity, require zero or near-zero water input, supply the owners with food via hydroponics and additional income streams, while ensuring satisfaction in home-ownership through empathetic and collaborative design. CEEPH will also serve as a regional resource for workforce development through training regional contractors, architects, house subsystem service providers, city leaders, etc.
An ERC in this area has the potential to foster the interdisciplinary discovery of novel scientific and engineering knowledge that could significantly improve all humans' impact on our environment through the development of environmentally friendly and sustainable technologies. The Center would be founded on the fundamentally transformative principle that integrated residential power generation and potable water production from human and household organic waste (among other solutions) is a scientifically sound and socio-economically viable and responsible approach. In addition, a potential Center's research outcomes would have far more disruptive impacts on current housing designs as we propose an active and living ecosystem that is self-sustained by internal symbiosis and synergy. One of the important pillars of the planning grant for the proposed CEEPH is the inclusion of all aspects of housing design with numerous stakeholders' input. This planning grant will provide an opportunity for potential ERC participants and stakeholders to participate in a two-day intensive discussion at Mississippi State University to strengthen the development of the goals for the proposed ERC, communication pathways, plans for an inclusive environment, and identification of additional stakeholders. The planning grant activities will focus on the development of diverse interdisciplinary teams and address challenges related to team science by establishing pathways to strong communication and collaboration between the scientists, engineers, economists, policy researchers, architects, and stakeholders. Since the proposed Center activities could have significant impacts in developing countries, the planning grant will be used to identify international partners that would benefit from these discoveries and give a global prospective on the impacts of center's activities. Consequently, outcomes of this planning grant activities help prepare for the anticipated center?s research on empathetically designed housing models that will be self-sustainable and profit-deriving sources for the homeowners.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
