Nearly 100 students from 11 universities competed in New Mexico State University College of Engineering’s 34th annual WERC Environmental Design Contest April 7-10 at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum.
The WERC Environmental Design Contest brings industry, government and academia together in search for improved solutions to today’s environmental challenges in all fields of engineering. Real-world environmental challenges were presented in five different topics, and each team was challenged to build working models of their solutions.
“This was a landmark year for the contest as we focused on engineering challenges that address environmental justice issues. Industry and government agencies helped us develop the tasks by providing us with real-world situations and data,” said Ginger Scarbrough, WERC program manager. “Three of the five tasks addressed environmental justice concerns. The tasks were stormwater management for community resilience, sodium sulfate for a circular economy – community-based solutions, and modular carbon dioxide removal for community integration.”
A total of $37,000 in awards were presented. Winning universities include NMSU, Northern Arizona University, Michigan Technological University, University of Arkansas, University of Idaho, University of Mississippi and Washington University in St. Louis.
NMSU won the Energy, Environment and Sustainability Award for task two, towards net-zero—distributed energy resource management systems for the electoral grid.
“Their solution involved complex power usage scheduling on the electrical grid, an issue that is a major challenge to electric companies as the world moves toward using electricity as a clean-energy power source,” Scarbrough said.
NMSU also received an invitation to publish in WERC’s Conference Proceedings in the IEEE Xplore, a digital research database.
Sponsors for the 2024 contest were New Mexico Space Grant Consortium; El Paso Electric; Freeport-McMoRan; Las Cruces Utilities; Chevron Corporation; Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management; Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development; NGL Water Solutions; IEEE, El Paso Section; Jacobs; and Souder, Miller, and Associates.
For a breakdown of all winners, awards and tasks, visit https://werc.nmsu.edu/teams-winners/2024-teams1.html. To learn more about the WERC Environmental Design Contest, visit https://werc.nmsu.edu/index.html.
