Environmental Engineering at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo

The story recorded here began with a timeline prepared by Professor Rod Keif outlining some of the important events in the formation of the Environmental Engineering Department at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. He expanded the timeline and added some comments in a 5-page History of Environmental Engineering at Cal Poly in 1998 (1). Rod Keif was a key player in the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering Department that eventually became the Environmental Engineering Department. He prepared his students to be leaders in the industry, received the Distinguished Teachers Award in 1967, and was chairman of the Academic Senate in 1969. My association with Rod goes back to when he came to the University of Oklahoma to interview me after I had applied for a job at Cal Poly. I expanded his timeline into a slide show, and remarks for the 40th Environmental Engineering [ENVE] Anniversary Dinner at Cal Poly-May 23, 2009. In preparation for the 50th Anniversary of when the Environmental Engineering Department was established, I decided to combine, expand and update these remarks. I hope the reader will understand this was originally written as a personal account and left unchanged. I realize there were Cal Poly instructional staff working in the programs covered by the story whose names I did not record or know. It would have been interesting to include the names and story of each of our students as well but I will leave that task to the Alumni Office. I want to acknowledge the assistance of the Cal Poly Archives at Cal Poly’s Kennedy Library in finding pictures of some of the key players. In addition, thanks to proof readers Judy Cota, Cindy and Jesse Magliari, Ron and Jean Cota, Tim O’Conner, Doug Wolf and Sam Vigil who improved the story. The logo on the cover was created by Doug Wolf

Accelerator Memory Reuse in the Dark Silicon Era

Accelerators integrated on-die with General-Purpose CPUs (GP-CPUs) can yield significant performance and power improvements. Their extensive use, however, is ultimately limited by their area overhead; due to their high degree of specialization, the opportunity cost of investing die real estate on accelerators can become prohibitive, especially for general-purpose architectures. In this paper we present a novel technique aimed at mitigating this opportunity cost by allowing GP-CPU cores to reuse accelerator memory as a non-uniform cache architecture (NUCA) substrate. On a system with a last level-2 cache of 128kB, our technique achieves on average a 25% performance improvement when reusing four 512 kB accelerator memory blocks to form a level-3 cache. Making these blocks reusable as NUCA slices incurs on average in a 1.89% area overhead with respect to equally-sized ad hoc cache slice

Hazardous Waste Management

Hazardous waste management is a broad and evolving field. Applicable state and federal regulations comprising over 60,000 pages are continually being updated. Many of these regulations overlap and are subject to differences in interpretation that often lead to court rulings. Regulations, economic pressures and public perception are forcing companies to rapidly change the way they manufacture products in order to minimize hazardous waste generation. Over 200 million tons of solid hazardous waste are generated annually in the United States. Huge quantities of hazardous waste deposited in landfills, ponds, fields, and other locations require removal or in situ treatment. Common hazardous wastes include: Solvents, acids, bases, heavy metals, pesticides, plating and heat treating wastes. Six major effects of improper hazardous waste management are: groundwater contamination, contamination of surface runoff, air pollution, fire and explosion, adverse health effects via direct contact, and via the food chain. This chapter provides a general overview of federal regulations governing hazardous waste management, as well as a brief review of the types of hazardous waste, waste minimization, and treatment and disposal technologies. Four types of hazardous waste will be discussed here: chemical waste, radioactive waste, infectious waste, and mixed waste

Potential--density pairs for spherical galaxies and bulges: the influence of scalar fields

A family of potential--density pairs has been found for spherical halos and bulges of galaxies in the Newtonian limit of scalar--tensor theories of gravity. The scalar field is described by a Klein--Gordon equation with a source that is coupled to the standard Poisson equation of Newtonian gravity. The net gravitational force is given by two contributions: the standard Newtonian potential plus a term stemming from massive scalar fields. General solutions have been found for spherical systems. In particular, we compute potential--density pairs of spherical galactic systems, and some other astrophysical quantities that are relevant to generating initial conditions for spherical galaxy simulations.Comment: Paper accepted for publication in MNRAS, with four figure

University Programs in Air Pollution Control: Review and Outlook

From the inception of the National Air Pollution Control program, the U. S. Congress has been mindful of the need and importance of adequate manpower. The challenging technical problems which lie ahead in enforcement, monitoring, testing and research can be effectively dealt with only by individuals with specialized knowledge, skills and experience. In this paper the authors look at undergraduate and graduate training that is being carried out, employment opportunities and the way these may change in the future. A recently completed survey of college level air pollution training in the United States and Canada is included in the report

Non-Minimal Chaotic Inflation, Peccei-Quinn Phase Transition and non-Thermal Leptogenesis

We consider a phenomenological extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) which incorporates non-minimal chaotic inflation, driven by a quadratic potential in conjunction with a linear term in the frame function. Inflation is followed by a Peccei-Quinn phase transition, based on renormalizable superpotential terms, which resolves the strong CP and mu problems of MSSM and provide masses lower than about 10^12 GeV for the right-handed (RH) (s)neutrinos. Baryogenesis occurs via non-thermal leptogenesis, realized by the out-of-equilibrium decay of the RH sneutrinos which are produced by the inflaton's decay. Confronting our scenario with the current observational data on the inflationary observables, the light neutrino masses, the baryon asymmetry of the universe and the gravitino limit on the reheat temperature, we constrain the strength of the gravitational coupling to rather large values (~45-2950) and the Dirac neutrino masses to values between about 1 and 10 GeV.Comment: Final versio