Engineers for a Sustainable World engages students in collaborative projects that put sustainable practices at the forefront of their work. Currently, the club has three ongoing projects – SmartTree, Green Wall and AutoAquaponics. 

SmartTree

SmartTree is working on building a solar-powered charging station for Northwestern’s campus. The goal of the project is not to create revolutionary environmental change, but to show students an active way they can use reusable energy in their everyday lives, said McCormick sophomore Mirabelle Berman Reinhardt.

Berman Reinhardt joined the SmartTree team last spring. At that time, the project had been ongoing for three years. Although the design phase predated her time at NU, she jumped into construction and became a project manager this year.

“(Solar-powered charging) is something that now, I think, has become a thing that a lot of college campuses have, but not necessarily constructed by a student group,” Berman Reinhardt said. “It was an idea of a way to demonstrate solar power being used in a tangible way for students.”

The team is currently working on constructing benches where students can sit and charge their electronics and putting together solar panel branches to absorb solar power and produce energy, Berman Reinhardt said. Next quarter, the team plans to focus on the electrical system and putting the finished project out onto NU’s campus.

Green Wall

McCormick senior Ellie Lind, alongside Cameron Moore (McCormick ’24), pitched Green Wall to ESW’s presidents during her sophomore year. Green walls, vertical structures covered in plants, provide insulation for smaller homes, Lind said. They also provide shade and help with heat loss or gain depending on the season, she added.

Green walls are made by stacking grow beds on top of each other. Through a network of tubes, water collected in the top planters will drain down through the system. This method of watering, known as drip irrigation, will help spread the water evenly throughout the grow beds.

Before focusing on insulation, the team must tackle a difficult problem: how can green walls survive in a cold, Midwestern climate? To combat this problem, the team plans to work with juniper plants and pachysandra. Pachysandra would cover much of the green wall’s surface area and provide more insulation of the soil for other plants to grow better, Lind said.

The club is building their first full-sized prototype grow bed after building a miniature model last year. This full-sized prototype will allow the team to focus on plumbing, too, Lind said. The drip irrigation system will help limit water usage.

“The way we’re trying to do it is picking materials and how it’s watered, to kind of limit waterways, because a lot of green walls aren’t actually sustainable,” Lind said.

The group hopes to build the green wall on the side of Ford Design Center this summer, plant in the fall and have it up and running next year with at least one planter and one watering system.

AutoAquaponics

AutoAquaponics is building a self-sustaining aquaponics system — a vertical agriculture system that can grow fish and plants and can be controlled remotely. Bacteria within filters in the system turn fish excretion into nutrients for the plants. In turn, the plants keep the water healthy by removing fish waste.

“The main benefits are, no, you don’t need to use fertilizers, and it’s very water efficient,” McCormick senior Yanni Wilcox, who serves as ESW’s co-president, said.

To more closely monitor the system’s input, AutoAquaponics’ electrical team is working on an automatic fish feeder to dispense food by weight rather than volume, Wilcox said. AutoAquaponics is also working to optimize plant combinations as well as increase the number of grow beds. Currently, the system resides in an office in the Ford Center basement.

To make their work more accessible to the public, AutoAquaponics’ software team is fine-tuning a livestream of the aquaponics system on the AutoAquaponics website, and the biology team is sharing AutoAquaponics’ open source design with other education groups.

Email: laurahorne2027@u.northwestern.edu

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