Programs
Since the establishment of the Engines & Energy Conversion Laboratory (EECL) in 1992, it has been active in developing solutions to environmental and energy problems. The EECL has developed several environmental solutions for engines that are now in production and widespread use. From the beginning, the EECL’s philosophy has been simple; a technical solution is only genuine when implemented on a scale proportional to the problem. The EECL is one of the world’s largest university-based engines / combustion laboratories. It is housed in a standalone 30,000ft2 facility that employs over 55 student research assistants, a staff of 6 full-time professionals, over 10 faculty affiliates, and contains over $10 million of specialized equipment for conducting research on energy, combustion engines, and fuels of all types. Since its inception, the EECL has conducted over $25 million of contract research with industrial groups such as Caterpillar, Cummins, John Deere, and government agencies such as the US Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of State, and the National Science Foundation.
Over the last 7 years, the EECL has become increasingly active in applying its expertise to global environmental problems, and strives to achieve solutions on a global scale. With this experience comes the realization that often the most daunting challenge in this process is the business, rather than the engineering.
Envirofit International, Ltd. (www.envirofit.org) was the first product of this realization. Envirofit was formed to develop and commercialize well-engineered technology solutions to improve the human condition on a global scale, with a primary emphasis on applications in the developing world. In the rank of organizations developing products for the “bottom of the economic pyramid” markets, Envirofit is unique in its utilization of the same rigorous product-development methodology and protocols used by modern industry. This requires rigor in areas like design, validation, manufacturing, quality control, supply chain management, distribution, inventory management, and marketing.
In an effort to generalize the Envirofit model and apply it to other applications, in 2005 the College of Engineering and the College of Business established the Global Innovation Center (GIC) within the EECL to facilitate solutions to energy, environmental and health problems in a developing world through the formation of innovative business structures to disseminate these products on the widest appropriate scale. A key difference is that the GIC conducts early stage research and development while Envirofit is focused on utilizing these R&D developments to produce and distribute products in the developing world. Currently, the GIC has 11 faculty, staff and paid student researchers working on a number of village-scale energy issues. The primary research of the GIC revolves around the development of a clean-burning efficient biomass cookstove for the developing world. This research is conducted at the EECL, where the GIC researchers have access to the world’s most advanced measurement equipment for measuring gaseous and particulate emissions from cookstoves.
In addition, the EECL worked closely with Spirae on the development of the InteGrid Laboratory – one of the world’s most advanced centers for testing and development related to renewable energy, distributed generation, and power system management.
