Vision

The Water Treatment, Agricultural-logistics, and Renewable Energy (WeARE) systems project’s vision is to establish the knowledge base, training, mentorship, outreach, and partnership activities needed to support the professional development of a diverse student population at UTSA to enable rising sustainable STEM leaders.

Misson

The WeARE project’s mission is to:
• Generate new cross-listed courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels to improve the curriculum,
• Create and support a collaborative and interdisciplinary research infrastructure in WeARE systems,
• Develop workshops and seminars using innovative approaches to convey knowledge and explain the science behind the management, optimization and conservation of WeARE Systems,
• Educate undergraduate and graduate students through experiential learning and first-hand research experiences for UTSA students with an emphasis on under-represented minority populations in the STEM field, and
• Our long-term goal is to transform UTSA’s research environment and educational programs in biorenewable energy and water resources.

Research Highlight

(1) Agricultural/biomass logistics

(2) Biorenewable energy integration, production and technology

(3) Water resources systems and water quality.

Facility

(1) The Flexible Enterprise and Lean Systems Lab conducts research on green and sustainable manufacturing as well as explores the identification and elimination of environmentally related wastes (energy, water, materials, garbage, emission, transportation, and biodiversity) via value stream mapping and other lean tools.

(2) Sustainable Enterprise Systems Lab with a research thrust in green technologies enabling the improvement of environmental friendliness via green assessment, intelligent controls, and alternative designs/materials.

(3) Manufacturing Systems and Automation Laboratory (MSA) (https://ceid.utsa.edu/~castillo/facilities.php), which is a state-of-the-art facility for teaching, research, and development in advanced biomass supply chains and bioenergy technologies. The MSA lab incorporates effective and efficient integration and synthesis of automation technologies, human resources, and decision-making models for design, planning, scheduling, and control of agriculture/bioenergy systems.

The MSA Laboratory is furnished with simulation, optimization, and statistical software:
• Simulation software: Promodel, SimEvents, and Simulink.
• Optimization software: GAMS, Matlab, and CPLEX.
• Statistical software: Minitab 16, SAS, and JMP.

Two Dell Precision T7600N MT 1300W Workstations:
• Operating System FreeDOS™ Operating System.
• Processor Dual Eight Core XEON E5-2687W, 3.1GHz, 20M, 8.0 GT/s, Turbo+.
• Memory 64GB, DDR3 RDIMM Memory, 1600MHz, ECC (8 x 8GB DIMMs).
• Graphics Dual 2.5GB NVIDIA® Quadro® 5000, QUAD MON, 4DP & 2DVI.

The MSA laboratory also includes ten cubicles for students with personal computers, conference room with videoconferencing capabilities, production, inspection, assembly, warehouse (RFID), enterprise resource planning, and shop floor control equipment and software .

The Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio is housed in a building finished in Dec. 2006. The laboratories are equipped with standard equipment for wet chemistry experimentation, including balances, oven, microscope, batch reactors with temperature control, column apparatus, Barnstead water purification system, microcentrifuge and ultracentrifuge, pH meters, DO probes, spectrophotometers and other water quality equipment, fume hoods, storage rooms for corrosive chemicals and solids, and environmental chambers for refrigeration and heating. The labs are classified as BSL-1 for biosafety.

The Hydraulics Labs main facilities are housed in the Applied Engineering and Technology built in 2009 at UTSA in a ~1452 sq ft space. The main laboratory has mobile benchtop workstations, fume hood, sink, a flume, and equipment to test permeability and porosity along with field sampling equipment for water resources.