Four University Civil and Environmental Engineering students teamed together to develop a proposal for a residential living system of the future.

Christiana Barnas, Cameron Talischi, Peter Pascua, Sean Poust and team adviser, Professor David A. Lange won The City of the Future Engineering Student Challenge in Chicago on March 1. Pascua, Poust and Talischi are seniors in Engineering and Barnas is a junior in Engineering.

The challenge, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, IBM and the History Channel, was the second phase of a two-phase competition, which began with architecture teams in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles developing design visions for the future of their respective cities. The winning Chicago architecture team and grand prize winner of national voting was UrbanLab, an urban design practice in Chicago.

The concepts developed by the architecture teams were the basis for the student contest. Lange said that the architecture team had “great concepts for Chicago in 2106, but few details about how the concepts could be achieved, and this is how the student contest was conceived.” After receiving an e-mail from a press representative of the contest sponsors, Lange assembled a team of some of the University’s lead undergraduate students in the Environmental and Civil Engineering program.

Because the challenge was kept a secret from the team, they were selected based off of their diverse backgrounds and an array of specialties in engineering. In January, the challenge was revealed and there was then a five-week period for the team to create a design solution.

UrbanLab’s concept for their city of the future was “Growing Water in 2106” in which they pictured a city where water is the new oil. Chicago would use an “Eco-Boulevard” to treat its waste and storm water. The system would harvest the water, treat it naturally using microorganisms and return it to the Great Lakes Basin.

Poust, senior in Engineering, added that as the group brainstormed ways to implement UrbanLab’s idea into their own design, they found that the UrbanLab concept lacked a disinfecting process.

“You have treated water that has been treated to some degree but there will still be toxins and viruses in water,” Poust said.

The group also created a high-density vertical hydroponic living system, which treats wastewater naturally and would provide everyone in Chicago equal opportunity for water.

The students collaboratively came up with the idea of “Eco-Towers” to be the residential living system of the future.

“We designed a modular building used for residential or any type of domestic use,” Pascua, a senior in Engineering, said. “There would be segments of buildings that could house people and each segment could be stacked up to four main buildings. Each Eco-Tower ties into a central greenhouse system so that people could pay less for water bills and would also be used to keep moderate temperatures.”

Each cluster of Eco-Towers would treat grey water and black water. In the team’s design, the grey water is passed through a biomimetic forward osmosis membrane bioreactor, and then through the windows of the tower for ultraviolet disinfection. The disinfected grey water would be reused in the EcoTower while black water would be treated in a greenhouse with a vertical treatment train. This innovative design impressed the five judges of the contest.

Lange described the team’s solution as “innovative and creative.” Pascua said the team’s concept could realistically be implemented in the future.

All four members of the student team received $1,250, a new IBM Thinkpad computer and were proclaimed “IBM Engineers of the Future.”

“It’s a pretty big honor,” Pascua said. “We’re just four people on a really short time frame and that’s pretty much how it is in the real world, designing things on the spot and presenting it to someone you don’t know. It was an exhilarating and fun experience.”