Engineering Students Win Waste Energy Harvesting Competition
A team of University of Maryland students claimed the $25,000 grand prize this month in the Radiance Technologies Innovation Bowl, a competition that required them to build an efficient energy waste harvesting device in under two months.
Four A. James Clark School of Engineering students and their faculty adviser were announced as winners at the annual academic competition at Radiance Technologies company headquarters in Huntsville, Ala. The team presented 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 team leader Kenneth McAfee Ph.D. ’25, an aerospace engineering student. “For this project, it was fun to go from a concept to a prototype in such a short time frame. We had to approach the problem differently from how we normally do in research.”
The team advanced to the Innovation Bowl finals late last year after facing off against eight other college teams to create harvesting proposals for energy typically lost to the environment, such as from inefficient heating and cooling equipment. In the second phase of the competition, the three finalists—UMD and teams from Georgia Southern University and the University of Memphis—developed their ideas in six weeks through prototypes, models, simulation and experimentation before presenting their findings in person to a panel of experts on April 3.
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 UMD’s Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics.
“We went in knowing that we had only one chance to build a working device, and the risks were significant,” Rabin said. “But to our delight, not only did the device work, it performed exactly as we expected it to.”
