Contest rewards student industry, innovation
For more than five years, the USC-City of Columbia Fuel Cell Collaborative has hosted an annual “Fuel Cell Challenge” competition with the purpose of identifying and accelerating innovation and commercialization in hydrogen and fuel cell technology.
This year, students have until Oct. 22 to submit a proposal to win a research grant out of the available $75,000. Only two student teams will be chosen, according to the Fuel Cell Challenge website, and the winners will use the money to bring their ideas to reality during the spring semester, culminating in a final product presentation in May 2013.
The student teams will work in collaboration with businesses in the hydrogen and fuel cells technology field.
“The University of South Carolina is one of the industry leaders for fuel cell research,” said program coordinator Frank Avery. “A lot of the research does not make it to the market, however, because people do not think to turn to USC for this research. We are aiming to fix that.”
Since the start of the annual competition, the program has invested approximately $5 million dollars in 20 projects in order to aid the discovery, development and deployment of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.
This challenge has not only helped to establish new companies and improve companies by advancing the commercialization of fuel cell technologies, but it has also assisted in establishing Columbia as one of the top destinations for hydrogen and fuel cell innovation.
The program is split into two competitions that groups formed by students can choose to prepare for, and a total of $75,000 is allocated between three winners. The first of the two challenges is the Innovation Challenge, which allows students to come up with a novel idea regarding fuel cells. The second is the Industry Challenge which is designed to combine scientific, technological and business knowledge in order to solve problems hydrogen and fuel cell companies experience. Avery said diversity of knowledge is one of the things the “Fuel Cell Challenge” is looking for in its applicants.
“Our biggest goal is that [a group] should be interdisciplinary,” he said. “We also want the application to be a clear, concise business plan that addresses the problem an industry is facing, should the students do the Industry Challenge. The ultimate goal is to develop the plan into a product or a tangible service that can be sold or even to create a company.”
Nab Aggarwal from WeylChem Sustainable Materials won $100,000 in 2010 for a project focused on making high purity — greater than 99 percent — ammonia borane on a commercial scale. Aggarwal is the most recent winner of the challenge because the “Fuel Cell Challenge” was not held last year in order to make some important changes and to restructure the program. Avery said the changes to the program included a push for more involvement from different areas of study.
“This is the first year where we had a such a clear interdisciplinary focus,” he said. “We had all the directors of the departments across campus as well as the vice president of research get involved. It is now a strict requirement for a group to be interdisciplinary. The reason is that we want the solution proposed by the team to be viable by including students from all over campus.”