FACILITIES

Each REU student will have office and lab space, as well as the necessary equipment to perform the assigned activities. Students will have access to the USF Library, computing facilities, transportation, and recreational facilities.

The USF Library system is home to 1.6 million volumes, 11,000 periodicals, and more than 4 million microfilms. The USF Tampa Campus Library serves as the USF Library System’s research center. The USF Library is a state-of-the-art facility with over 300 public access PC’s, open-access student computer labs, an electronic post office, networked teaching labs, wireless access throughout, full-text electronic resources, and the state’s first full-text electronic reserve. LUIS, the on-line catalog, provides access to the other State University System library catalogs and offers 60 databases. These features allow the USF libraries to offer students, faculty, and staff the best possible instruction and research support to assist in their academic achievements.

The Environmental and Water Resources Engineering (EWRE) program at the University of South Florida (USF) maintains over 3,000 square feet of research laboratory space, providing state-of-the-art analytical and experimental equipment for chemical and biological work. This value will increase by 5,000 square feet with the development of the laboratory promised to two recent hires: Dr. Mihelcic and Dr. Q. Zhang who are part of this proposal. The existing laboratories are equipped with fume hoods and bench space to accommodate approximately 30 research students. In addition, a separate laboratory (approximately 450 square feet) is dedicated for teaching purposes.  Field sampling equipment available at USF includes battery operated pumps, Van Dorn surface water sampler, Van Veen bottom grab sampler, soil corer. The Advanced Materials Research Laboratory (AMRL) at USF has state-of-the-art equipment and tools necessary to synthesize and characterize materials for multifunctional applications. AMRL occupies more than 2,500 square feet and houses a comprehensive thin film processing system that includes pulsed laser ablation, sputtering, ASTEX CVD, evaporation tools as well as analytical characterization instruments (nanoindenter, tribometer, four-point resistively measurement, chemical mechanical planarization tester and supporting preparation tools). Additional materials research equipment at USF is located in the Nanomaterials and Nanomanufacturing Research Center (NNRC: http://nnrc.eng.usf.edu/) and some are listed below.

The Clean Energy Research Center (http://cerc.eng.usf.edu) at the University of South Florida has been working in the broad areas of renewable hydrogen production, hydrogen storage and fuel cells for the last 10 years. The mission of the center is to develop, evaluate and promote commercialization of new environmentally clean energy sources and systems such as hydrogen, fuel cells, solar energy conversion, biomass utilization, photocatalysis etc., that meet the needs of the electric power and the transportation sector through multi-disciplinary research, technical and infrastructure development and information transfer. The Center supports regional economic development of manufacturing and high technology business, in conjunction with the National goals of improving our global competitiveness and technology leadership. CERC has been awarded more than 15 millions in contracts and grants over the past 10 years. The CERC team comprises of 20 affiliated faculties from different disciplines (Electrical, Chemical, Mechanical, Industrial, Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry) of USF, staff and 20 graduate and undergraduate students.

The college is also supported by a Machine shop; Electronics/Electrical support staff; Environmental Health & Safety Department; Physical Plant; and there is a Glass company close to USF (www.ars-fla.com).

Major equipment available in individual laboratories across the Engineering College

Web and Computing Access at the University of South Florida. The college-wide Ethernet network is connected to the USF campus-wide Gigabit Ethernet backbone. Within the College connections are provided to faculty offices and laboratories via fast 100 Mbps net.  Our Internet2 connection links USF to more than 140 major universities and research institutions in the nation.  Dial-in access is available to faculty and student from a large USF modem bank. The APEX studios are also networked to provide computer demonstrations for remote classes.  The Academic Computing Services provides University Wide services such as email, web-page, dial-up access, high performance research computing, course management tools such as WEBCT, Blackboard along with support for faculty and staff in course materials development and dissemination via the web.  They also maintain the Internet2 campus computer network and related services.  Every course on campus has a Blackboard website automatically created to facilitate web-based delivery of course material. 

To support computational research, the environmental health group has a state-of–the–art supercomputing Beowulf cluster built by Microway.  The cluster is housed and administered by the USF’s Research Computing Core.  Also, Research Computing at USF currently administers the Integrated Research Computing Environment (IRCE) which primarily consists of a dedicated 169 node Beowulf Cluster, 3 large memory SMP computers, and a Condor Grid installation.