Maryland Engineers Win Radiance Technologies Innovation Bowl
A team of University of Maryland students won the 2024-25 Radiance Technologies Innovation Bowl, a competition to build an efficient energy waste harvesting device in less than two months. Four A. James Clark School of Engineering students and their faculty advisor were announced as winners of the Innovation Bowl, an annual academic competition between universities seeking innovative approaches to current technological challenges. Their winning presentation, titled “Solid-State Annular Power Generators for Waste Heat Harvesting in Directed Energy Systems“, was delivered by the student team at the Radiance Technologies headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama. They also delivered a prototype, consisting of a heat exchanger pipe that converts waste heat into electricity using the principle of Transverse Thermoelectricity. “We built something tangible and then reinforced the experimental results with theory,” said Kenneth McAfee Ph.D.’25, an aerospace engineering student leading the team. “For this project, it was fun to go from a concept to a prototype in such a short timeframe. We had to approach the problem differently from how we normally do in research,” he said. The team advanced to the Innovation Bowl finals late last year, when they challenged 10 college teams submitting parasitic energy harvesting proposals to the competition. In the second phase of the competition, the three finalists—which included teams from Georgia Southern University and the University of Memphis—developed their ideas in six weeks through prototypes, models, simulation and experimentation and presented their findings in person to a panel of experts on April 3 in Huntsville. In addition to McAfee, the team included Keegan Guyett Ph.D.’28, Ryan Paxson Ph.D.’28, and Stefan Popovski ’27, and was mentored by Associate Professor Oded Rabin from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Their parasitic energy device was built in Rabin’s laboratory at the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). The victors exceeded expectations in a challenge that involved designing, building and testing a device and demonstrating its effectiveness within a six-week period—a process that in conventional engineering research and development settings requires multiple rounds of prototyping and experimentation. Because of the short time available, all the specialty components had to be produced in-house by the students. “We went in knowing that we had only one chance to build a working device, and the risks were significant. But to our delight, not only did the device work, it performed exactly as we expected it to,” said Rabin. The Radiance Technologies Innovation Bowl is an academic competition between schools and conferences affiliated with the Independence Bowl. Schools compete for a $25,000 grand prize by developing innovative approaches to a current research and development topic selected by Radiance Technologies. The topic of the 2024-25 Innovation Bowl focused on recovering energy from sources typically lost to the environment, including motion, vibration, heat, and radio frequency emissions. By capturing waste energy, systems can achieve greater operational efficiency or provide for auxiliary capabilities and functions. Applications range from uses in microelectronics and wearable devices to transportation and defense systems.
April 25, 2025 Prev |
