Research

Excellence in Energy Research

For Bruce Logan, sewage treatment and clean energy go hand in hand.

Credit: Wikimedia CommonsAll Rights Reserved.

Bruce Logan works with graduate student

Logan and postdoctoral researcher Hong Liu test a prototype for a microbial fuel cell in 2005.

The innovative research of Bruce Logan—Kappe professor of environmental engineering and director of the Penn State Hydrogen Energy Center—is well known to readers of Research/Penn State magazine. Logan and his collaborators and students have long been focused on the development of new technologies to create clean, renewable forms of energy while at the same time improving water infrastructure in both industrialized and developing countries.

In recent years, we've reported on many aspects of Logan's work, including microbial fuel cells that produce electricity from wastewater and microbial electrolysis cells that use that same wastewater—plus a small amount of added electricity—to produce hydrogen. In both cases, the task of treating wastewater, an expensive problem particularly in developing countries, is transformed from an energy drain into a source of clean power.

For this outstanding work, Logan was recently named the 2009 winner of the Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Prize for excellence in water-science research and technology, an annual award given by the National Water Research Institute. The award includes a medallion and $50,000 and will be awarded on July 9 at the Sixteenth Annual Clarke Prize Lecture and Award Ceremony at the Fairmont Newport Beach hotel in Newport Beach, California.

In honor of this achievement, here is a round-up of our articles and related resources.

Bruce E. Logan, Ph.D., is Kappe professor of environmental engineering in the College of Engineering; bel3@psu.edu.

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Last Updated June 18, 2009