Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

DRI scientists inventing new ways to monitor valley’s air quality, climate

There had to be a better way.

That's what was going through Vic Etyemezian's head when he and his fellow Desert Research Institute scientists were trying to figure out how to measure the dust coming off Las Vegas Valley roadways.

The method of the day back in 1999 was to close off part of the road and literally vacuum it, a slow and dangerous process, Etyemezian said.

The eureka moment came one lazy Saturday afternoon, when, while drilling holes in a DRI vehicle, Etyemezian realized he could direct a pipeline down through the floor of the vehicle to the tire. The pipeline could then suck up the dust being kicked up by the tire and direct it immediately into tools that could measure the particle size.

With the help of Hampden Kuhns, another DRI atmospheric sciences professor, and Marc Pitchford, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency in Las Vegas, the TRAKER or the Testing Re-entrained Aerosol Kinetic Emissions from Roads was born.

The TRAKER van allows Etyemezian and other DRI scientists to directly measure how much dust is coming off the roadway and to travel on several different roadways all around the valley, Etyemezian said. Gone are the days of vacuuming the road.

Etyemezian and his colleagues are part of an ever-growing group of scientists at the institute who are inventing their own devices when they find that current technology isn't giving them the best data possible on factors that affect air quality and climate in Nevada.

Now a long way beyond the TRAKER, the internationally renowned institute is working to market some of those inventions to the public.

DRI recently received its first ever royalty check -- $6,000 -- from the licensing of its photoacoustic sensor, a patented device that can help measure dust and ozone's impact on visibility, J. Scott Hauger, vice president for government and business relations, said. Through a partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, DRI has also licensed a "hotplate advanced precipitation monitoring system" for sale.

"It's really a milestone for DRI," Etyemezian, research professor for the division of atmospheric sciences, said of DRI's first licensing arrangements. The TRAKER wasn't marketable enough to be patented, but Etyemezian is hoping his Swirler device, which measures the dust that erodes off the ground during high winds, will soon be licensed. It currently has a patent pending.

The institute, with locations in Las Vegas and Reno, also has five other inventions in the process of being licensed and patented, another six in the pipeline and about a dozen others that are being considered for patents or commercial use, Hauger said.

Patenting and licensing the inventions that arise out of DRI's research allows that technology to be put to wider use in the general public and raises money to be ployed back into research, Hauger said.

More importantly, the patents give DRI an edge when competing for other grants and contracts because researchers can boast that they have access to a device that a researcher at another institution does not, Hauger said.

"We can say as part of our proposal that we are the only ones that can do this for you because we developed the capability and patented it," Hauger said.

DRI receives less than 17 percent of its budget from state funding and relies on grants and contracts to cover the bulk of its costs.

The money generated by the licensing, albeit small at this point, also rewards the scientists who come up with the invention. The researcher receives about 60 percent of the money from sales of a product after DRI has recouped all of its patenting costs, which runs upward of $10,000 per device plus internal management fees. The researcher's division receives 25 percent of the net revenue and the institute receives the remaining 15 percent.

The single wavelength photoacoustic soot and aerosol sensor invented by DRI atmospheric sciences researcher Patrick Arnott measures the sound wave a particle of soot puts off when it absorbs the light, negatively impacting visibility, DRI researcher Mark Green said. Green has recently used the device to measure pollution near Charleston Avenue and 28th Street, and found it did as well or better than the old filtering devices scientists used.

Arnott said the licensing of his sensor is exciting because it means researchers all over the world will be able to use his device and expand on current research. A German research group has already used the sensor in Brazil, China and Greece.

"It's nice to see your baby go all the way from conception to the marketplace," Arnott said.

"... It (licensing) will probably be a growing activity at DRI once people see the benefits that come of it."

John Hallett, an atmospheric physics research professor at DRI, is similarly grateful to see his "hotplate" put to use so that he can gather better data that allow him and other researchers a better grasp on global climate change. Invented in conjunction with NCAR's Roy Rasmussen, the hotplate more accurately measures precipitation by gauging how much energy it takes to evaporate the rain or snow as it falls onto the plate.

The device gives very rapid information about the rate of precipitation in real time, Hallett said. By knowing exactly how fast rain or snow is coming down and where, weather officials will be better equipped to know whether a plane needs to be de-iced or whether there might be flash flooding.

Current devices can take an hour to a day to adequately measure snowfall, Hallett said.

The transfer of technology from the lab to the world has been developing in academia for the last 25 years, Hauger said, but DRI has only recently got on the bandwagon. The institute opened a joint technology transfer office with UNR in July 2003.

The move to patent research breakthroughs and technology is part of a "culture change" in academia, Hauger and DRI scientists said. There is a tension between wanting to get the research out to the public and wanting to protect that intellectual property in order to see it have larger use.

UNLV is just now beginning to develop patents from its research, and has yet to license anything for commercial use, Paul Ferguson, vice president for research and graduate studies, said. That will come as UNLV develops its research structure, he said.

UNLV currently has three patents awarded and six more pending, Ferguson said, mostly for new biomedical methods.

UNR has 34 patents with 48 more pending approval, according to Lisa Grey in the UNR-DRI joint technology transfer office. Eight have been licensed for commercial use. The patents include innovations in nanotechnology, fuel cell technology, mining operations, biotechnology, medical diagnostics and energy production.

All of the inventions coming out of DRI were developed as part of ongoing research, Hauger and DRI scientists said. The internationally renowned institute specializes in environmental research, particularly the study of climate, air and water quality issues in desert lands.

"First we use it in our studies and then we think: Wait a minute. Other people might be able to use it as well," Etyemezian said.

Etyemezian said DRI's failed attempt to patent the TRAKER gave him and other scientists some quick lessons in patent law that helped him when he applied for the patent for the Swirler, also known as the PI-SWERL, or Portable In-Situ Wind ERosion Laboratory.

Etyemezian, Kuhns and Pitchford again collaborated on the invention, this time with the help of two undergraduate electrical engineering students at UNLV, George Nikolich and Sean Ahonen. Nickolich still works at DRI as a UNLV graduate student, and Ahonen is getting his master's degree in engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

"They basically did all the hard work and we had all the fun," Etyemezian said of the students.

The Swirler uses a blade within its core structure to simulate wind speeds up to 50 mph, Etyemezian said. The device then measures the size of the particles that are kicked up, and can be used by air quality officials to measure whether construction sites or other areas are doing enough to prevent dust pollution.

The current method to measure dust is to actually build large long wind tunnels, often 15 to 20 feet long, to simulate the wind and measure the dust coming off the ground, Etyemezian said.

"If Clark County wants to find out if someone is in violation, this is not a reasonably thing to cart around," Etyemezian said, pointing to picture of a wind tunnel that took seven people to operate.

"This (the handheld version of the Swirler) is something you can pull out of your trunk and plop down and take a measurement."

The device could also be marketed to construction sites or other land owners to help them self-monitor the dust coming off the land, Etyemezian said, adding that he is currently using the device to test different remediation methods to avoid dust pickup at the Nevada Test Site.

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