The mechanical engineering faculty at RIT Dubai University encourages students to participate in various competitions as one of the tools utilized to teach students innovation and encourage them to excel in their work, think out of the box and look for solution to emerging engineering and environmental problems. Over the last three years, Mechanical engineering students won many prizes in this field.
This year, RIT Dubai students participated in the Future Generation Competition held on March 1-3, 2016 in Dubai Trade Center. Three projects were presented by the students spanning the field of renewable energy. The projects were proposed, designed, fabricated and tested by the students. The below is one of the presented projects.
HYDRO ELECTRIC WASTE WATER TURBINE
In this project, we attempted to harvest energy from waste water in the drainage system of high rise buildings. In any high rise building, a particular amount of initial energy (varying from building to building) is used to raise water to high levels and the same water is allowed to flow down under gravity with absolutely no energy recovery. Our prototype turbine is expected to recover 25-30% of this energy and re-direct it to an inverter for power storage or consumption. We wanted to tackle this issue, in the UAE in particular, as we have an abundance of high rise buildings and our prototype fabrication cost is expected to be relatively low which makes it a highly cost efficient and desirable investment for this region.
The project won the runner up prize during the Future Generation Competition-2016, one of the Middle East Electricity Conference Awards.
