Smart monitoring for the Xprize/Musk Foundation Carbon Removal Award competition
Are you looking for an opportunity to work on interesting and varied challenges at the cutting edge of the fight against climate change? Then this is the project for you! We’re assembling a team of motivated and interdisciplinary students to work on Smart Carbon Monitoring for Wood Burial and Storage. What is that? Wood burial and storage is the process of sustainably harvesting timber and collecting waste wood and putting it into long term underground storage. This sequesters the Carbon in the wood, taking it out of the global Carbon cycle and helping to combat the effects of anthropogenic climate change. It prevents the waste wood from rotting and allows forrestland to be replanted, eventually repeating the process. The current challenge is monitoring the burial sites to make sure the Carbon is actually sequestered. That’s where the smart monitors come in. A suite of sensors, connected to the internet, could be buried with the wood and send real time data on the underground environment, including temperature, moisture, CO2, CH4, and O2, allowing us to analyze the efficacy of the sequestration.
The UMD Environmental Monitoring Lab (EML) has developed several generations of low cost carbon dioxide and particulate matter sensors. But the challenge of applying this technology to this newest challenge is where we need YOU. Engineers and computer scientists to help with design. Atmospheric scientists and mathematicians to work on the analysis. Technical writers to work on grants and share our findings with the world. Our first step is applying for funding through the highly competitive XPrize ( https://www.xprize.org/prizes/