PhD students share David Douglas Award

Mazin Muhssin and Hua Xiao, PhD students at the School of Engineering working in energy research, are recipients of the 2018 David Douglas Award from the South Wales Institute of Engineers Educational Trust.

The Committee Trustees of SWIEET-2007 awarded Mazin his prize for the research paper ‘‘Dynamic Frequency Control Using Heat Pumps”. This paper is an extended version of a previous work awarded the best paper prize in the international SST-2016 conference that was held in Croatia. The project presented a new solution to a real problem in power systems. The findings of the project have been obtained in collaboration with National Grid and was published in the prestigious Journal of IEEE Transaction on Power System and the Journal of Applied Energy.

His research was partly funded by The Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq (HCED-program). Mazin is supervised by Dr Liana Cipcigan and Professor Nick Jenkins from the School of Engineering.

Hua Xiao won his award for a research paper “Exploring an Alternative Fuel Application: Combustion Kinetics Evaluation for Gas Turbine Use”. This paper explored the potential of co-firing alternative fuels such as methane/ammonia for power generation. The study helped identify areas that need more attention for emission control and model development so that the combustion process can be refined to be more suitable to ammonia combustors.

Hua Xiao has arranged to use his money to visit relevant research groups in Shanghai Jaio Tong University and the University of Science and Technology of China, Sichuan, which will help promote research collaboration with international institutions.

The Award is presented each year to recognize students who have provided outstanding research submissions in the field of engineering, and is open to engineers under the age of thirty and postgraduate engineering students.