For its project Structured Heat Exchange for Optimized Water Energy Recovery (SHOWER), Dr. Fischer’s group received the award in the Research category. As the acronym recommends, the job concentrates on bathing and hot water generation. Showers are the second-largest energy consumer in households, while waste heat remains the greatest untapped energy source. To harness this capacity, Dr. Michael-David Fischer, Simon Baier, Laura Jakobsen-Urwald, Luis Ohm, Andre Grütering, and Solvejg Höller are developing maintenance-free heat exchangers. Their technology could conserve majority of the energy required for hot water production– such as for showering. In Germany alone, this would make it possible to minimize yearly carbon dioxide emissions by up to ten million tonnes. The group works in close cooperation with service and industry partners to advance this advancement.
A jury of professionals from academic community and practice selected the awardees from 28 submissions. In the Mentor category, a project from Ruhr University Bochum was recognized, while in the Transfer classification, a task from the German Sport University Perfume received the award. “This year’s submissions when again show how diverse, creative, and practice-oriented the responses from NRW’s clinical community are to the challenges of the sustainability transition,” stressed jury chair Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Lambert T. Koch. “The Humboldtⁿ Award makes a crucial contribution by raising awareness of these solutions, supporting their implementation, and inspiring originalities.” The Future Conference at the University of Duisburg-Essen brought together agents from universities and non-university research study organizations in NRW with policymakers from the state government.
About Humboldtⁿ
In 2021, the 16 universities of North Rhine-Westphalia signed up with forces with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy to release the Humboldtⁿ initiative, with the objective of actively promoting sustainability within higher education. Considering that 2023, the Humboldtⁿ Award has actually been presented biennially to give greater visibility to sustainable research study.