SUNY Poly professor researching climate change to aid infrastructure 

A professor at SUNY Polytechnic Institute secured nearly $400,000 in grant money for research on climate change and structural design standards.“We’re trying to work with the National Center of Atmospheric Research … to be able to get some climate model data to use to predict the ice load for the future,” said Dr. Ahmed Abdelaal, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and technology at SUNY Poly.He says the models they are working with can help them predict future ice load hazards on buildings across the U.S.“Generally, these buildings are built using the standard. If they are built using historical data that predict ice load to be certain values, they may not be able to be resilient in the future to be able to handle more ice loads,” Abdelaal said.Abdelaal was awarded $397,000 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to support his research on the impacts of climate change when it comes to structural design.“This work actually, is supposed to help the power line transmission line engineers, the telecommunication towers and other buildings because ice problem is actually a big problem for them,” said Abdelaal.He says there are some areas that have never experienced ice storms or freezing rain but may experience this in the future. They are working on mitigation efforts, which they tested on another study with wind turbine blades. “We did a computation study, and experimental study to be able to see how much power would be needed to be able to deice the winter bind,” Abdelaal said.They used thermal wires that use energy to produce heat which helps melt the ice. Abdelaal says this could be a strategy for power lines. “How much power needed, that’s going to be the question. We need to make sure it’s going to be economic for the power line industry,” Abdelaal said.As the research grows, he’s hoping to get students involved by securing funding to hire them to work on this project — “especially undergraduate students, because we’re trying to make them involved in research activity,” Abdelaal said.