I am always impressed by the ingenuity of our chemical engineering community to find ways to communicate about our work, so when I was contact by Erik Engebretsen a member of a team of PhD students, lecturers and industrial partners based at UCL (University College London) about their public engagement work I was immediately interested.
The team, cleverly called UCell, are based in the Electrochemical Innovation Lab (EIL), in the UCL Department of Chemical Engineering and are working on ways to produce electricity from hydrogen.
In 2011 the idea to start the initiative came from a suggestion by Ralph Clague and Ellen Dowell (the curator of Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man Festival) that it could be possible to power a small tent of electronics at Green Man using just green energy.
Ralph then began searching for UCL students interested in taking on the idea as a summer project, aiming to find a way to build a hydrogen cell system that could provide emission free power for Einstein’s garden.
With support from the EIL, Imperial College London and BOC the team succeeded in providing power at Green Man.
Continue reading Using green energy to power Green Man (Day 248)
IChemE 