AUD’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Team from the School of Engineering have been awarded a 50,000 AED research and development grant for their project, E-Chain for the EXPO Live University Innovation Program.
AUD’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Team from the School of Engineering have been awarded a 50,000 AED research and development grant for their project, E-Chain for the EXPO Live University Innovation Program. Expo Live is a partnership program launched with Expo 2020 Dubai to fund, accelerate and promote creative solutions that improve the lives and environment of our planet. The program aims to be a short-cycle, grant making innovation competition focused on students and mentors creating solutions for social impact challenges that are relevant to the UAE and the MENA region.
E-Chain stands for Energy Chain with the principle behind the project being that buildings that have a clean energy power system (solar or wind), will have the ability to share their excess energy produced with other buildings that do not have sufficient energy. The E-Chain system is built on a secure platform where all buildings can communicate via their energy provider. This platform is based on sharing power using blockchain technology enabling home-to-home energy selling and buying or to their energy provider.
The E-Chain project is not only concerned with creating a project that benefits the environment but also the economy and community. The process of buying and selling improves the economy of the residents of UAE and the energy provider. The students were inspired with this idea while working on the house they built for the Solar Decathlon in which they won second place for energy management, whose solar panel system produced significant excess amount of energy, so much so that it was returned to the local provider grid.
The students who have accomplished this achievement, with the supervision of Dr. Vinod Pangracious, are:
