RWTH : Launch of New International Research Training Group with Focus on Hydrogen
The German Research Foundation DFG is set to fund a collaboration between RWTH’s Institute for Combustion Technology and Tokyo Institute of Technology
Providing the world’s ever-growing energy needs has led to serious impacts on climate, biodiversity, and ecology; and it has become evident that a transition to a renewable and carbon-neutral energy economy is urgently needed.
Hydrogen will play an important role in the future energy landscape for storing renewable energy. However, the rapid implementation of a hydrogen infrastructure faces technological challenges in terms of production, storage, energy use, and methods for integrating the various renewable energy sources, energy sectors, and geographical regions. This is where the German-Japanese International Research Training Group “Hy-Potential: Hydrogen – Fundamentals for Production, Storage and Transportation, Applications and Economy” comes in, which is established and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
In this group, ten professors from RWTH and eleven from Tokyo Tech are jointly researching important aspects of the hydrogen life cycle in the areas of production, storage and transportation, electrochemical conversion in fuel cells, use in combustion processes, life cycle assessments, and energy system analyses.
Spokesperson for the group is Professor Heinz Pitsch, Head of the Institute for Combustion Technology. “In the new Research Training Group, the participating doctoral candidates and postdocs are required to think outside the box,” said Pitsch. “In addition to research, the holistic training of early-career researchers in all the above areas is an important goal of the Research Training Group. This is the only way they can help shape the hydrogen system of the future, taking all relevant aspects into account.”
The Aachen group is one of three International Research Training Groups (IRTGs) to be newly established by the DFG; the other two groups have teamed up with partner institutions from India and Switzerland. The DFG is establishing a total of 17 new Research Training Groups (RTGs) to promote the careers of early-career scientists. This was decided by the responsible DFG committee in Bonn. The new IRTGs will initially be funded for five years with a total of around 123 million euros, starting in fall 2024. The funded research includes explainable AI in medicine, hydrogen as an energy source, and human-environment systems.