Developing fuels for the future at the University of Birmingham.
Title: Dr Waldemar Bujalski - Developing fuels for the future
Duration: 2.24 mins
Speaker Names (if given): S1 Dr Waldemar Bujalski
S1 I’m a Research Fellow in Chemical Engineering, working on fuel cells and transient technology and this is my general area of interest. It’s extremely exciting. New technologies are coming on board in order to replace the older ones, which are causing so severe problems which we all know in terms of the climate change and problems with the fossil fuels in general. There are a variety of those technologies, including low and high temperatures and I’m especially interested in the high temperature ones, which are applicable to combined heat and power units, replacing the existing poly plants for example, in sort of distributed areas locally, which would lower very much the losses associated with today’s coal or gas-fired plants. It’s a very, very important research in my view.
Today, as we know, we are all facing problems with security of supplies. The fossil fuels are running out. We know that it’s just a matter of time, it’s a ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ situation. So it is very, very important to tap into resources that are practically unlimited. The hydrogen is one of the potential replacements for today’s fuels and the technology if it is developed further could really assure the existence and well being of the whole civilisation, in my view.
It’s really exciting: I think I wouldn’t make too big a claim, but I think that the fuel cells are going to do to energy fields a similar thing to what micro chips did to information technology. There is really a matter of getting the technology robust and durable and good enough to replace the old technologies. It’s a matter of miniaturisation and it’s going to happen, I’m pretty convinced; that's why I am so excited about this particular research area.
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