UC Riverside Students Win Big for Combined Fuel Cell Design
ateam of under- graduate students from the Univer- sity of California,
Riverside, Bourns College
of Engineering received
national honors Wednesday for their research
aimed at generating hydrogen for residential electrical
storage. It was their third
national award this year.
The students, Jason
Skovgland, Joon-Bok Lee,
Christian Contreras and
Marcus Chiu, all fourth-
year chemical engineering
majors, and Joshua Goins,
an MBA student, placed
second against 54 teams
from throughout the world
in a U.S. Department of
Energy contest in Wash-
ington, D.C. The team
won for their design of a
residential hydrogen fuel-
ing system for a hydrogen
vehicle or stationary fuel
cell in a single-family home.
The system can use solar-
generated electricity to
electrolyze water, with the
help of a cheap catalyst.
From left to right, Marcus Chiu, Joon-Bok Lee, advisor Kawai
Tam, Christian Contreras and Jason Skovgland display the
plaques they received in Washington, D. C., for placing second
in a Department of Energy contest.
and a lecturer at the Bourns
College of Engineering.
“This one team has won
the most awards in the
history of our chemical and
environmental engineering
department.”
Under the guidance of
Tam and Yushan Yan, a
professor of chemical and
environmental engineer-
ing, the students started
work on the project in
September 2009 for the
EPA P3 competition. They
were looking for an effi-
cient, affordable and green
way to bring electricity to
the quarter of the world’s
population that lives with-
out it.
REC Solar Opens 1.2-MW System on Kauai REC Solar in February commissioned a 1.21-megawatt photovoltaic farm at Kapaa, Kauai, said to be the largest PV system in Hawaii. The system was financed by Kapaa Solar, which will sell power to the Kauai Island Utility Coop- erative, and uses 5,376 REC 225-watt PE-series modules on fixed-tilt ground-mounted racks, feeding four 250-kilowatt Advanced Energy Solaron inverters. The inverters connect to the 12.8-kilovolt grid through a single 1-megawatt step-up transformer.
DRew BRADley/ReC SolAR
