Sustainable Industrial-Natural Coupled Systems (SINCS)

Our work is currently supported by NSF CBET and NSF DEB.

Welcome to Sustainable Industrial Natural Coupled Systems (SINCS) Group. The mission of SINCS group is to enable sustainable growth of biobased economy and industries along with ensuring local and global ecological sustainability. Dr Shweta Singh is the PI of SINCS and her vision is to enable a synergy between industrial and natural systems that aligns with the Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Engineering vision.

SINCS is an interdisciplinary group and resides in  Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. Our research interests lie in Sustainability Engineering focusing on developing mathematical models for physical coupling of industries with natural systems through complex systems modeling approaches. To accomplish this vision we integrate process systems engineering models with macroeconomic models and utilize the methods of machine learning to provide insights into interface of engineering and economy. We also analyze the environmental implications of these changes through emissions and resource consumption to inform adoption of sustainable technologies. 

CV

Email : Singh294@purdue.edu 

Office : ABE3041 D 

Members : Please visit Members page ! 

SINCS Group Members at AIChE Annual Meeting, 2021

Left to Right : Miriam Stevens (PhD Student, EEE) | Apoorva Bademi (PhD Student, ABE) | Shweta Singh (PI) | William Farlessyost (PhD Student, ABE) | Abhimanyu Shekhar (PhD Student, ABE)

News 

September 2023 : Congratulations to Abhimanyu on his first 1st author paper as PhD student and to Raghav for his 2nd paper from UG research. The paper discusses a hybrid machine learning approach for designing sustainable industrial networks towards net carbon negative systems. Paper link here

August 2023 : Welcome Hari to the group ! Hari joins us as MS student in ABE. His research will focus on biodiversity loss in freshwater ecosystem in US and circular economy for pharmaceutical industry. 

October 2022 : SINCS lab has opening for 2 MS/PhD students to start in Spring 2023 or Fall 2023. And one Postdoc opening to start immediately. Please check the Openings page for Project details. Send your CV ! 

Sep 2022 : We are grateful for National Science Foundation, Future Manufacturing program for funding our work on Sustainable Pharmaceutical Manufacturing. News release here

April 2022 : 2nd year PhD student William Farlessyost wins the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations Will ! Look forward to your exciting industrial sustainability research. 

Nov 2021 : SINCS group presented at AIChE Annual Meeting. 

Oct 2021 : Excited to be elected as one of the Directors of AIChE Environmental Division for a three year term from 2022-2025. Looking forward to work with the leadership team and executive committee. Thank you to those who have put their trust in me for this position, through their votes. 

Oct 2021 : News release on our modeling tool PIOT-Hub released by Purdue . See here.

July 2021 : Congratulations to Gargeya Vunnava on acceptance of a key paper from his PhD thesis - : "Integrated mechanistic engineering models and macroeconomic input-output approach to model physical economy for evaluating the impact of transition to a circular economy" in Energy & Environmental ScienceAvailable Here. Thanks to National Science Foundation CBET for supporting this work. 

July 2021 : Congratulations to Miriam Stevens on successfully defending her MS Thesis - "A framework for domestic supply chain analysis of critical materials in the United States : An Economic Input-Output Based Approach." ! She will continue as PhD student in the group. 

June 2021 : PI Singh is one of the 83 early career engineers from industry, academia and government to be selected for the US Frontiers of Engineering symposium in 2021 by National Academy of Engineering. See announcement here. PI Singh is humbled and excited to be part of this FOE cohort.

March 2021 : Cloud based platform implementing our novel algorithm for automation of mapping manufacturing networks is ready for beta testing. For more details on technology click here. IP filed.

It was also picked up by Global Manufacturing news (click here) for advanced sustainable manufacturing solutions. Thanks to National Science Foundation CBET for funding this work. We are very excited to bring the technologies built on advancement in Industrial Ecology for transforming real world manufacturing.

Feb 2021 : Humbled and excited to be elected in leadership role as Nominating Committee Member for International Society of Industrial Ecology. Election news here. Look forward to contribute to expand the impact of ISIE in building a sustainable world.

Dec 2020 Congratulations to group members Nehika Mathur on another journal article and Miriam Stevens on her first journal publication, a Review article "Thematic exploration of sectoral and cross-cutting challenges to circular economy implementation" Accepted in Journal of Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy. 

Authors : Singh S., Babbitt C., Gaustad, G., Eckelman, M., Gregory, J. Ryen, E., Mathur N., Stevens, M.C., Parvatker A., Buch R., Marseille, A., Seager T.  

Dec 2020 : Congratulations to Gargeya Vunnava on successfully defending his PhD thesis on Dec 1st. Dr. Vunnava will be joining Amazon as Sustainability Scientist in Seattle, Washington immediately following his graduation. Good luck from the group ! And I am sure he will contribute significantly to help Amazon design their sustainability strategies. 

Nov 2020 : Congratulations to undergraduate researchers from group Renganathan Subramanian and Raghav Moar on their journal article on Machine Learning for Dynamics titled "White-Box Machine Learning Approaches to Identify Governing Equations for Overall Dynamics of Manufacturing Systems : A Case Study on Distillation Column" accepted in Elsevier journal, Machine Learning With Applications. Great work as Undergraduate researchers ! Authors : Renganathan Subramanian, Raghav Moar and Shweta Singh. 

Oct 2020 : Cloud based Physical Input-Output Table (PIOT) generation via PIOT-Hub. We have developed a cloud based collaborative tool, that is in internal testing phase. See here : https://mygeohub.org/piot 

The tool will be made available for testing by external researchers next month. Due to the cluster access and storage capacity, currently the tool is not open to public. However, we plan to launch it in next ISIE conference ! We are excited about all the collaborative PIOT development in future.

Sep 2020 : SINCS group member will be participating in Virtual AIChE Annual Meeting. Checkout our multiple talks on different topics : Spatial LCA for Biodiesel | Wind Energy Expansion Impact Assessment | Mechanistic models for PIOTs and Circular Economy, | Modeling spatial and temporal emissions from animal sector, | Mapping Supply chain of Cobalt, | Optimization approach to Industrial Symbiosis planning |and Machine Learning to Identify governing equations.

August 2020 : Congratulations to group member Miriam Stevens on being selected as emerging leaders for Circular Economy by GreenBiz.

https://events.greenbiz.com/events/circularity/online/2020/emerging-leaders

August 2020 : William Farlessyost joins the group as PhD student in ABE and ESE program. Check out details on Members page. Welcome Will !!

July 2020 : Congratulations to PhD candidate Gargeya Vunnava on Winning the Student Oral Presentation Award for his talk "Economic and energy impacts of wind energy expansion in the US using multi-regional input-output (MRIO) tables" at International Society of Industrial Ecology (ISIE) Americas Virtual Conference (http://conferencia.pucp.edu.pe/isieamericas2020/ )

March 2020 : Invited Paper in Journal Processes Special Issue on "Bioenergy systems, Material Management and Sustainabilty" Accepted. "Spatial Life Cycle Analysis of soybean based biodiesel production in Indiana, USA using process modelling". Authors : V.S. Gargeya Vunnava and Shweta Singh. 

Dec 2019 : Paper on creating an Industrial symbiotic network for recycling PV waste Accepted in Resources Conservation and Recycling : "Promoting a Circular Economy in the solar photovoltaic industry using life cycle symbiosis" Authors : Nehika Mathur, Shweta Singh, John. W. Sutherland

Nov 2019 : Paper on US MRIO model Accepted in Applied Energy journal : "Using a new USA Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) model for assessing economic and energy impacts of Wind Energy Expansion in USA",  Authors : Futu Faturay, Gargeya Vunnava, Manfred Lenzen, Shweta Singh

Sep 2019 : PI Singh is invited as panelist to speak on Teaching Challenges and strategies to overcome it for Pretenure Women Faculty Conference held at Purdue. 

Aug 2019 : Welcome Miriam Stevens to the group as EEE graduate student. 

July 2019 : SINCS group student, Gargeya presents his work on Computational Methods to create PIOT at ISIE conference in China. !

May 2019 : Esai Lopez from NMSU joins as SURF Pathways student. His work is focused on Spatial LCA for Biodiesel production in Indiana.

May 2019 : Renganathan joins as PURE summer student, focusing on applications of Machine Learning.

April 2019 : Congratulations to Undergraduate Researcher Yunru Chen for being accepted to Johns Hopkins Biomedical engineering program ! She has been working on Mathematical models for biological systems.

March 2019 : Congratulations ! to PhD Student Gargeya on Winning Second Prize at Student Poster Competition at NSF Grand Challenges in Resilience Workshop at Purdue, CRISP. ! His poster was on "An Automated Approach to Build Industrial Ecosystem Network Using Physical Input-Output Tables generated from Computational Process Models". https://twitter.com/CrispPurdue/status/1108532955901845505  

Feb 2019 :  Congrats to PhD student Gargeya for his journal paper accepted  in Journal of Cleaner Production,  "Entropy Generation Analysis of Sequential Anaerobic Digester Ion-Exchange Technology for Phosphorus Extraction from Waste", Gargeya and Singh. (Accepted). Preprints Available Upon Request. 

August 2018 : PI Singh recieves a National Science Foundation Award. We are thankful for this generous support.

May 2018 : PhD student Nehika Mathur wins Purdue Climate Change Research Center travel grant to present her work at ISSST 2018. Her talk will address building a circular economy based on Photovoltaics and is part of special theme on "Circular Economy in Electronics". Congrats Nehika !

Jan 2018 : Paper titled, "The carbon-nitrogen nexus of transportation fuels" accepted in Journal of Cleaner Production, Jan 2018

Nov 2017 : AIChE Talks PIOT for Food-Energy-Water Nexus and Demand Change of Electricity in Urban Area Under Renewable Energy Adoption .

August 2017 : Gargeya joins as PhD student in SINCS group starting Fall 2017 ! Welcome Gargeya. 

June 2017 : Paper titled, "A Nitrogen Physical Input-Output Table (PIOT) Model for Illinois" accepted in Ecological Modelling, June 2017.

May 2017 : Prof Singh receives Purdue Research Foundation Grant for Summer 2017.  We are thankful for this generous support.

April 2017 : SINCS will be present at joint ISIE-ISSST 2017 in Chicago, June 25-29, 2017. Links to our talks are : Process Modeling Based PIOT and Thermodynamics of P Recovery (Gargeya Vunnava and Singh). Prof Singh is also organizing a special session "Thermodynamics in Industrial Ecology and Sustainability" with eminent talks from Thermodynamics experts in Industrial and Urban Ecology. 

Feb 2017 : Paper titled "The nexus of Carbon, Nitrogen and Biodiversity Impacts from Urban Metabolism" accepted in Journal of Industrial Ecology. Feb 2017.

Nov 2016 : SINCS will be present at AIChE Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Nov 13- Nov 17, 2016. Links to our talks are :PIOT Modeling  and Thermodynamics for SINCS 

Oct 2016 : PI Singh analyzed 3600 cities to provide changes in energy demand  in response to climate change till 2030, that was used by International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) to develop renewable energy technology adoption in cities for sustainable transition to energy. A report was published based on the analysis : IRENA Renewable Energy in Cities Report

Aug 2016 : Welcome Nehika Mathur to the group ! Nehika starts her PhD program in EEE with Prof Shweta Singh and Prof John Sutherland. She has an international experience working in the field of sustainable manufacturing, design engineer with L & T and as National Consultant for UNIDO. 

May 2016 : Welcome V.V.S Gargeya to the group ! Gargeya is a visiting student, pursuing a unique BS-MS program in India at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (Based in Hyderabad campus) in Manufacturing Engineering & Biological Sciences. He will be working on his MS thesis while at Purdue. 

May 2016 :  Welcome Kevin Hill to the group. Kevin is a Mechanical Engineering student and will work on an interdisciplinary project with Prof Singh, Prof Brady Hardiman and Prof David Yu under the SURF program !

Jan 2016 : Group Alumni Sam Schaffter wins NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Sam is now at John Hopkins University pursuing his PhD in Chemical Engineering. ! Congrats Sam !! 

Nov 2015 : Jacob Wheately wins the i2i Research Scholarship. He will work on his research with group for 2 semesters. Welcome Jacob ! 

Mar 2015 : Paper on "Estimating Future Energy and Emissions of World's Cities" Accepted in Environmental Pollution., March 2015

Jan 2015 : Paper on environmental cost of nitrogen accepted in Environ. Research. Letters., Jan 2015

Jan 2015 : Paper on Carbon and Nitrogen Footprint accepted in Ecological Indicators, Jan 2015