Bob Urban

Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University

Welcome to Bob Urban's Webpage

Graduate Research Associate

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

The Ohio State University

urban@chbmeng.ohio-state.edu

About Me

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, I received my bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Ohio State University in 2005. After 2 years at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) in Columbus, OH, I returned to OSU and am currently in the Ph.D. program in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. When I'm not busy with school, I enjoy playing a variety of sports, playing guitar, and spending time with my wife Tara and cat Rusty.

My Research

In general, my research considers ecosystem goods and services that are used directly and indirectly in every industrial process and how they can be used to perform tasks ordinarily reserved for industrial unit operations.

My advisor and I wrote paper on the life cycle of 1,3-propanediol (PDO), which is a polymer precursor that can be used to make a cornucopia of products from plastics to fibers. PDO is traditionally produced by reacting syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) with ethylene oxide, both of which are fossil-derived. A new technology uses starch fermentation to produce PDO, which has been touted as a "green" alternative to traditional PDO. This study examines in more detail the life cycle impacts in the form of emissions, resource consumption, and ecological goods and services consumption of PDO production from both fossils and biomass. The goal is that a more detailed analysis such as this will help thoroughly examine the possible benefits or drawbacks of producing PDO (and other products for that matter) via non-traditional methods. The paper has been published online in the ACS publication Industrial and Engineering Chemical Research and can be viewed here.

We currently working on a project to examine the "Residential System" - i.e., the system that is composed of the things we consider to be our homes, such as the house itself, the surrounding lawn and trees, the heating/cooling system, and other appliances. The house, cars, appliances and outdoor power equipment can be thought of as a "technological system" while the turfgrass and trees can be thought of as an "ecological system", so essentially this problem involves an interaction of industry and ecological systems. We have dubbed these "TEco-Nets", short for technological-ecological networks. This project is to examine the interaction between the industrial and ecosystem systems - i.e., the natural uptake of CO₂ and other pollutants in turfgrass and trees countered by the emissions and resource consumption created by operating the residential system over the whole life cycle. Previous studies have examined this idea, but stop at the "process level", meaning they only consider direct emissions related to operation of the house. The goal of this project is to move beyond that of a traditional LCA by optimizing the residential system to operate at minimal environmental impact and minimal cost by changing the multitude of variables that impact these quantities. We hope that by studying a small TEco-Net, we can get a basic framework and understanding of how an ecosystem like turfgrass and trees interacts with industrial activities. This work will help translate the concept to much larger, complex TEco-Nets. Preliminary results of this study were presented at the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST) and can be viewed here.