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Sunset at the North Campus © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund
Sustainability Award

Research on Innovative Heat Exchangers Honored

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Photo: Three people stand in a festively lit hall holding certificates and white roses, while an audience is seated in the background. © Malte Reiter
Received the Humboldtⁿ Sustainability Award in Essen (from left to right): Laura Jakobsen-Urwald, Simon Baier, and Michael-David Fischer.
At the NRW Future Conference, the research group Structured Heat Exchangers led by Dr. Michael-David Fischer was honoured in mid-November with the Humboldtⁿ Sustainability Award. The group is part of the Transport Processes division headed by Prof. Alba Diéguez Alonso at the Department of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering of TU Dortmund University and collaborates closely with Prof. Norbert Kockmann’s team to develop innovative heat exchangers that can, among other applications, reduce energy consumption during showering.

For its project Structured Heat Exchange for Optimized Water Energy Recovery (SHOWER), Dr. Fischer’s team received the award in the Research category. As the acronym suggests, the project focuses on showering 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 potential, 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 save more than half of the energy required for hot water production – such as for showering. In Germany alone, this would make it possible to reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by up to ten million tonnes. The team works in close cooperation with business and industry partners to advance this development.

A jury of experts from academia and practice selected the awardees from 28 submissions. In the Teaching category, a project from Ruhr University Bochum was recognized, while in the Transfer category, a project from the German Sport University Cologne received the award. “This year’s submissions once again demonstrate how diverse, creative, and practice-oriented the answers from NRW’s scientific community are to the challenges of the sustainability transition,” emphasized jury chair Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Lambert T. Koch. “The Humboldtⁿ Award makes an important contribution by raising awareness of these solutions, supporting their implementation, and inspiring new ideas.” The Future Conference at the University of Duisburg-Essen brought together representatives from universities and non-university research institutions in NRW with policymakers from the state government.

About Humboldtⁿ

In 2021, the 16 universities of North Rhine-Westphalia joined forces with the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, Energy to launch the Humboldtⁿ initiative, with the aim of actively promoting sustainability within higher education. Since 2023, the Humboldtⁿ Award has been presented biennially to give greater visibility to sustainable research.

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