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FROM BIODIESEL TO BASEBALL
Technology transfer at SIUC casts a wide net.
What do biodiesel fuel, obesity, equipment operation, and sports training have in common?
All are areas in which SIUC is doing innovative research that may lead to commercialization or is already helping industry.
SIUC's technology transfer portfolio consists of new materials, devices, therapies, processes, and plant cultivars that are being or have been patented, licensed, or otherwise commercialized. These developments and discoveries by faculty and staff run the gamut—from disease-resistant soybean varieties, to super-tough materials for machining (see www.siu.edu/~perspect/05_fall/diamond.html), to a possible medical treatment to prevent or improve hearing loss (see www.siu.edu/~perspect/07_sp/hearing.html).
SIUC is a relative newcomer to tech transfer and commercialization. But our faculty are an enterprising lot: over the past decade, they've disclosed 174 inventions, leading to 47 licenses or options being issued to companies and 77 patent applications filed.
Now a look at those four areas.
Fueling up from the fat of the land
Restaurant owners consider the dark, smelly drippings in their grease traps a liability. After all, they have to pay someone to haul the stuff away.
But Yong Gao sees great opportunities in those grease traps.
 Gao, an associate professor of chemistry, believes he's found the chemical means to turn used cooking oil into biodiesel fuel to run automobiles. Biodiesel is becoming more popular worldwide, with some of the biggest potential markets in Europe, where a much higher percentage of automobiles use diesel engines than in the United States.
Gao's process also will turn a useless byproduct of traditional biodiesel manufacturing—glycerin contaminated with sodium hydroxide—into pure, high-grade glycerin sought by the pharmaceutical industry. And, closing the loop, it would solve the disposal problem for used cooking oil, some of which can be "recycled" by feeding it to livestock but most of which simply has to be disposed of.
With the help of the technology transfer program, Gao recently opened Midwest Energy Group Inc. at the SIUC-based Southern Illinois Research Park. A small team there will run tests and do engineering design for full-scale production using Gao's concept, which he says he has proven will work in the lab. Gao, who has filed for two patents related to his novel application of the chemical processes involved, also is negotiating with top chemical industry corporations. He currently holds a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Science Foundation to assist his endeavors.
Traditional biodiesel manufacturing starts with high-grade, pure vegetable oil—soy, palm, etc.—which is almost 100 percent triglycerides. The oil is mixed with methanol and a catalyst, then heated in a reactor. In about 30 minutes, the mixture transforms into two separate layers: biodiesel fuel and contaminated glycerin.
Used cooking grease contains only about 90 percent triglycerides; the remainder is free fatty acids. Such impurities are problematic in traditional biodiesel manufacturing, but not in Gao's new process.
He eliminates the problem by pretreating the waste oil in another reactor with a different catalyst that converts the free fatty acids into biodiesel. When the treated mix goes through the second reactor, the triglycerides are converted into biodiesel as usual, only with high-quality glycerin as a byproduct.
This new process would be cheaper, Gao says, because the source oil is cheaper and the pure glycerin is a value-added product offsetting the cost. The new process also would be more environmentally friendly since it doesn't generate contaminated waste products.
Gao plans pilot production tests this fall. He envisions SIUC becoming home to a biodiesel production demonstration plant, producing fuel while training future engineers in this environmentally friendly process.
"It would be wonderful if we had people from all over the world coming to Carbondale to see how this works," he says.
Fighting fat of a different kind
A synthetic compound could help fight fat and cut the chances of contracting a cluster of other conditions—cumulatively known as human metabolic syndrome—that can lead to heart disease, a team of multidisciplinary researchers spearheaded by SIUC has found.
"A lot of drugs now are treating either obesity alone or the individual conditions of metabolic syndrome—fat around the middle (the classic 'apple' shape), high blood pressure, high cholesterol and triglycerides, and insulin resistance, all of which can lead to heart disease," says team leader William Banz, professor of food and nutrition.
 "These drugs are not treating the whole syndrome per se, and some of them can cause a marked weight gain. Treating obesity plus the accompanying metabolic syndrome is novel. A lot of drugs in the pipeline (of development) aren't doing that."
Cal Meyers, an SIUC chemistry professor who holds a weight-loss patent on the compound, began working with its weight-reducing properties in the early 1990s. Meyers heads the University's Meyers Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry.
After finding that the compound decreased weight significantly in both male and female rats, Banz and his team decided to take a closer look at what else the compound might do. Follow-up research conducted at SIUC suggests it may also help treat adult-onset diabetes as well as insulin resistance, which characteristically precedes the disease.
"Being overweight or obese is definitely part of metabolic syndrome," Banz says. "However, metabolic syndrome as a whole is the real culprit when it comes to increased risk for heart disease and adult-onset diabetes. That's why we needed to further test this compound.
"What we found was that it was beneficial in reducing body weight and risk factors for metabolic syndrome and diabetes." The research team published those findings in the journal Obesity Research in November 2005.
Most recently, Banz and his colleagues, along with assistant professor of physiology April Strader, have studied how the compound does in treating glucose intolerance, a key factor in the development and progression of diabetes.
"We found extremely encouraging results," Banz says. "It improved glucose tolerance and decreased other risk factors associated with metabolic syndrome." The researchers presented these additional findings last April at a national conference on experimental biology.
Funding for the project has come from Charles River Genetic Models in Wilmington, Maine; PreClinOmics Inc. in Indianapolis; the Fraternal Order of Eagles; and the Meyers Institute.
The next step, Banz says, will require an industry partner.
"We would like for a drug company to pick up the intellectual property option and develop it (as an experimental drug for use in treating human metabolic syndrome)," he says.
Making machines more user-friendly
Companies spend large sums of research and development money studying how the machines they build interact with human beings. The more natural the interface, the more comfortable the experience for the equipment operator, and the lower the chance of injuries, such as those caused by repetitive motion.
Ajay Mahajan is developing technology that will allow companies to study a human's motion in such an environment in a much more accurate and timely manner. A professor of mechanical engineering and energy processes, Mahajan initially developed his 3-D ultrasonic location-finding system for use in brain surgery, where accuracy down to 1 millimeter is essential. (See www.siu.edu/~perspect/05_sp/neuronavigation.html.)
Mahajan's system is much less expensive and more robust than existing brain surgery systems, which rely on stereoscopic cameras and electronics to orient the surgeon. It uses sensors on a surgeon's probe that transmit ultrasonic signals to an array of receivers, which can pinpoint exactly where the probe is in relation to the patient's brain in near real time. A patent is pending for the technology.
Mahajan is working with manufacturers to find ways to interface his technology with current systems, improving its reliability and accuracy. His system also might work as a low-cost alternative to existing technologies.
 But it also quickly became apparent that the system had other applications. Caterpillar Inc. contacted Mahajan early in 2006 about using the system to improve its ergonomics program, which examines how operators of the heavy equipment it manufactures move about in the driver's seat as they control the powerful machines.
To do this, the company was using a stereoscopic-based system that tracked the action as an operator worked the machine while wearing a suit with brightly colored circles placed in key positions around the body (think Hollywood or video-game digital animation).
The system worked, but not as well as the company wanted. The accuracy was passable—it could detect positions to within about 1 inch—but the turnaround time between tests and actual data analysis took weeks.
Last summer, the Peoria-based company awarded Mahajan a grant to examine the feasibility of adapting the brain surgery technology to Caterpillar's needs. It didn't take long for Mahajan and his team—Haibo Wang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, doctoral student Sanjeevi Chitikeshi, and undergraduate Chris Jenkins—to prove it would work, even in the small, uncontrolled, and often harsh environment of a tracked or wheeled front loader.
The system, which the team is building and testing in a lab at the Engineering Building at SIUC, uses a network of 15 ultrasonic transmitters sewn into a suit worn by the operator and 10 receivers placed at various points throughout the cab. Engineers can record the operator's movements in three dimensions to within about 1.3 millimeters during a test. They can then easily download the information into a computer, where it is filtered using error-correcting algorithms and organized with specialized software the SIUC team also is developing.
Ultimately, the Caterpillar engineers will have quick access to accurate data—a big improvement over their current tools.
"Caterpillar has been a great blessing to us because it helped us take the technology in a new direction," Mahajan says. "We know now we can do it, we're just in the process of designing and turning this"—he sweeps his hand over the area of his lab covered with wires, circuit boards, and an array of transmitter/receivers—"into a set of simple black boxes. That's what Caterpillar will get when we are finished."
Knocking one out of the park
The legendary baseball pitcher Cy Young once said that pitchers, like poets, are born, not made.
Batters are another story.
Drawing on research techniques originally developed to study chess expertise, Peter Fadde has created video-based training drills that can transform a very good batter into an excellent one in no time at all—and he has the stats to prove it.
"It's no different than drilling in math," says Fadde, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction who recently published an article on his training program in the journal Technology, Instruction, Cognition and Learning.
 Batters need to automatically, not consciously, gauge where a pitched ball is headed so they know whether, when, and where in the strike zone to swing at it. Major-league batters make this decision in less than a quarter of a second—literally, the blink of an eye.
But a decision is a decision, even in such a short time frame, and that fact is key to understanding how Fadde came up with his drills. He aimed to train batters to recognize what different pitches look like at the moment the ball begins rocketing toward them and to deduce from that where the ball is heading. The ability to recognize a pitch, he says, has much more to do with picking up clues from the pitcher, such as stance and hand position, than with sharp eyesight.
Fadde, who in 2003 was at Purdue University, tried out his first pitch-recognition training program that year with the school's baseball team. Batters watched videotaped clips of easy, medium, and hard versions of pitches thrown toward the camera. Easy clips showed about 150 milliseconds of ball flight—about one-third of the distance to the plate. Medium clips showed about 65 milliseconds of ball flight. The most difficult video clips cut to black immediately after the ball left the pitcher's hand, showing no ball flight at all. Starting with the easiest clips and moving on to the most difficult, batters would call out the type of pitch thrown, and Fadde would tell them whether they'd made the right call.
"The essential elements of the drill-and-practice instructional method are repetition, immediate feedback, and progressive difficulty," Fadde says. "The ballplayers would look at the zero-ball-flight clips and say, 'I feel like I'm just guessing.' 'Yes,' I would say, 'but now you're "guessing" 90 percent right instead of 25 percent.'" Expert batters usually report that they "just guessed" at the pitches they hit, Fadde adds.
Over a test period of 18 games, the program scored a hit. The batting average for a control group of players who didn't receive training was .187; the trained group averaged .274. On-base percentage was .284 for the untrained group, .352 for the trained group.
Since coming to SIUC, Fadde and his graduate students have developed a laptop computer version of the program and have switched from baseball to softball. The program, for which SIUC has a patent application pending, was used by several of the SIUC varsity softball players before the 2005 season. It proved very helpful for one young player, Fadde says.
"At the end of the season, she tied the team record for home runs and led the conference in runs batted in," he recalls. "Of course, you always have to be careful in saying that one thing caused the other."
—by Tim Crosby, K. C. Jaehnig, and Marilyn Davis; illustrations by Evan Bowers
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