Research Publications

The recent recommendation to include sustainability considerations in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans has raised interest in the environmental impact of diets in a U.S. context. A few aggregat...

The unbroken global refrigerated supply chain, or cold chain, is rapidly expanding in developing countries. In addition to increasing the energy intensity of the food system, the expanded cold chai...

Wireless power transfer (WPT), which transmits power by an electromagnetic field across an intervening space, provides the prospect of new opportunities for electric vehicles (EVs) to enhance susta...

Investment and view damage costs are important determinants in siting locations for offshore wind farms (OWF) in the Lake Michigan region. This study is limited to the Michigan state boundary for t...

This report assesses the opportunities within Ann Arbor for the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles (AV) and provides recommendations on which AV systems can potentially enhance sustainability of ...

Ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems are significantly more energy efficient than conventional heating and cooling systems, but they have suffered from low market penetration. This study analyzes...

Due to decreasing solar module prices, some solar developers are increasing their projects’ inverter loading ratio (ILR), defined as the ratio of DC module capacity to AC inverter capacity. In this...

Taxis play important roles in modern urban transportation systems, especially in mega cities. While providing necessary amenities, taxis also significantly contribute to traffic congestion, urban e...

In a power system, having a high level of renewable energy penetration requires a large amount of ancillary services to balance the supply and demand in real time. Commercial buildings have signifi...

Environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) databases are increasingly used to examine environmental footprints of economic activities. Studies focusing on China have independently, repeatedly develo...

Fuel poverty, the inability of households to afford adequate energy services, such as heating, is a major energy justice concern. Increasing residential energy efficiency is a strategic fuel poverty i...

Siting decisions of offshore wind farms influence the magnitude of emissions reduction benefits. This paper calculates electricity generation and emissions reduction of CO2, NOx, and SO2, and values t...

Nations increasingly trade electricity, and understanding the structure of the global power grid can help identify nations that are critical for its reliability. This study examines the global grid...

Due to the complexity of power systems, tracking emissions attributable to a specific electrical load is a daunting challenge but essential for many environmental impact studies. Currently, no cons...

This study employs an Agent-Based Model (ABM) to simulate rural electrification in Liberia using biomass residues from Liberia’s major rubber and oil palm plantations. The model is constructed using t...

This dissertation focuses on the factors that shape how water resource managers shape the flow, or metabolism, of water through cities. Through a comparative and mixed-method approach drawing on ar...

With increasing environmental awareness, strategies that include energy storage and emissions constraints or costs in the dispatch algorithm have been proposed. However, the problem is challenging ...

High consumption of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is accompanied with a high yield of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Meanwhile, because the different types of resourc...

In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resili...

Within the Detroit metropolitan area, some residents are crippled by the surmounting utility costs making it an arduous endeavor to adequately regulate temperatures in their homes for a reasonable cos...

Examining scaling patterns of networks can help understand how structural features relate to the behavior of the networks. Input–output networks consist of industries as nodes and inter-industrial ...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to transform our transportation system. The forces that will influence the environmental impacts of large-scale AV adoption are identified to help deter...

Traditional forecasting models fit a function approximation from dependent invariables to independent variables. However, they usually get into trouble when date are presented in various formats, s...