Published May 12, 2024 by Patrick Gilchrist

An Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) device is helping get fine-scale energy-use data into the hands of engineers as the City of Galena readies to diversify its microgrid.

Coined ORCA — or On-site Realtime Data Collection and Acquisition — the device plugs straight into existing energy infrastructure and automatically transmits the raw information back to ACEP for processing before data gets returned to communities from which it originates in a neater form.

“The ORCA is designed to be a relatively inexpensive, easy to deploy, easy to prototype data collection device for rural powerhouses,” ACEP Research Engineer Henry Toal said Friday.

ACEP staff installed an ORCA at Galena in 2020, and the city is now putting that data to work.

Published May 11, 2024 by Adrian Peterson Adrian Peterson

Green-up occurred on May 3, but since April 15 the One Tree Alaska program has been collecting and converting birch sap into syrup, all the while conducting research on their products.

One Tree Alaska is affiliated with the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station at UAF as an education, research, and outreach program. They collect data and conduct research that is then shared with both the academic and local community.

While the interior witnessed green-up last weekend, there was a handful of residents and researchers that have been busy with the springtime harvest of birch sap.

Nearly a month since the taps began to flow, One Tree Alaska remains busy with their research on sap and syrup produced from birch trees. This annual occurrence has been followed by One Tree Alaska for years and they have continued to harvest, study and produce the sap and the syrup they make from it. “We’ll be harvesting for about two weeks average,” said Pearson Brodie, a “sugar master” at One Tree Alaska.“ On occasion we’ll have about a 20 day harvest or maybe you know this is a quick season and we’ll have less than two weeks.”

That sap then returns to the Lola Tilly building at UAF to undergo reverse osmosis, a process that removes water from the sap in an effort to concentrate sugars for the syrup. “In the past we’ve used steam to concentrate some of our products,” explained Brodie. This creates slightly different syrup that may be a bit darker, as does any change to the syrup making process. “We’ve had wood fired evaporators also that you now you’d almost get kind of a smoky flavor.” Currently the program is using a electric evaporator but they’ve also experimented with propane and heating oil evaporators.

Published May 11, 2024 by Sean Maguire

The Alaska Legislature on Friday passed this year’s capital budget, which has an emphasis on maintenance projects at K-12 schools. Other priorities include investments in renewable energy and housing.

The $4 billion capital budget funds dozens of infrastructure and maintenance projects across Alaska. Most of the funding comes from the federal government. Just over $550 million comes from the state treasury for projects chosen by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the Legislature.

The University of Alaska has an estimated $1.4 billion deferred maintenance backlog. The capital budget would allocate $28 million to fund eight maintenance projects across the university system. Planned renovations at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Consortium Library are focused on fixing its heating and electrical systems.

Published May 11, 2024 by Leah Thom

Two University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) students were honored with prestigious awards, the 2024 Barry Goldwater Scholar and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

UAF undergraduate student, Xochitl Muñoz, won the title of 2024 Barry Goldwater Scholar.

Muñoz, geosciences major, is the 10th person to receive the Goldwater Scholarship which encourages and financially supports outstanding juniors and seniors seeking research careers in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics.

The scholarship will award up to $7,500 per academic year, Muñoz is a rising junior so they will receive support for two years. They received one of 438 scholarships awarded out of 5,000 students and 446 academic institutions.

UAF Biology student, Jorda Kovash, was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Only one other person has received this prestigious award in Alaska for the 2024 cycle.

The fellowship opportunity will provide Kovash with three years of financial support including the cost of tuition. She conducts her studies in the Department of Biology and Wildlife under the guidance of the Institute of Arctic Biology.

“Jorda has already made significant contributions to this research, and I am excited to see what she discovers with the help of this fellowship in the next few years,” said research scientist Ursel Schütte, one of Kovash’s advisors and a co-principal investigator on the project. “It’s exciting for such a deserving student to be recognized by the NSF.”

Published May 11, 2024 by Rod Boyce, UAF Geophysical Institute

The LASSITOS project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by UAF Geophysical Institute Research Professor Andy Mahoney. He leads the institute’s sea ice research team, which had several members on the ice.

Mahoney explained the work a day earlier when the team was working closer to town.

“We are developing an instrument package capable of being deployed by a drone that can measure both sea ice thickness and snow depth at the same time,” Mahoney said. “These are two pretty fundamental properties of Arctic sea ice.

“We’re really good at telling by satellite how much sea ice is covering the ocean,” he continued. “Measuring the thickness of that sea ice is more of a challenge. We’re developing an instrument that will allow us to make those measurements over large areas with a drone.”

The drone work was accompanied by other “ground truth” tasks to validate the data from the airborne instruments: auguring ice holes to measure ice thickness, water depth, and ocean salinity; and making thousands of snow depth measurements using a device called a magnaprobe, somewhat like a modified ski pole that can measure snow depth and ice topography.

The LASSITOS project fills a knowledge gap. The project’s NSF description states that “methods of observing sea ice thickness at regional or basin scales with sufficient accuracy and resolution to capture growth and melt processes, detect hazards, or assess habitat quality are lacking.”

The long-term goal is to get ice thickness and snow depth data from a single drone payload. At this development stage, one drone carries an electromagnetic induction instrument hanging from a 10-foot tether and another drone carries the snow radar.

The drone carrying the induction instrument belongs to the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration, a unit of the UAF Geophysical Institute.

Published May 10, 2024 by NASA

NASA is awarding approximately $45 million to 21 higher-education institutions to help build capacity for research. The awards were made possible through the Minority University Research and Education Project Institutional Research Opportunity (MIRO) and Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) grants, which are funded by the agency's Office of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Engagement.

Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Award

NASA establishes partnerships with government, higher education, and industry to create lasting improvements in research infrastructure and capacity for specific states or regions, while enhancing its national research and development competitiveness. The program is directed at those jurisdictions that have traditionally not participated in competitive aerospace and aerospace-related research activities.

NASA will award 14 institutions up to $750,000 each over the course of a three-year period of performance. The awarded institutions and their projects are:

• University of Alaska Fairbanks in Fairbanks – NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland: The Alaska – Venus analog: synthesizing seismic ground motion and wind noise in extreme environments