UCF Wins TechConnect Defense Innovation Award

Every year UCF takes technologies developed on campus to the national TechConnect Conference for exposure and this year one of them earned one of the top awards of the conference.

The 2020 TechConnect Defense Innovation Award is a recognition for a technology that removes more than 90 percent of pollutants from engine exhaust at low temperatures by utilizing novel environmental catalysts with universal, scalable fabrication techniques. The award recognizes the best technologies submitted to the conference for their potential to positively impact national security.

Engineering Professor Fudong Liu and his environmental catalysis team member Shaohua Xie developed the technology with an eye toward automakers, who need to meet increasingly stringent government emissions standards. But the tech also has a number of potential applications.

Liu joined the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering and the university’s Catalysis Cluster for Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformations in 2018. He has a doctorate in environmental science and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles with more than 6,300 citations.

Catalysts spark and speed up chemical reactions and are critical in industries that transform raw materials into products. UCF’s tech expedites chemical reactions to help reduce harmful emissions from automobiles. The Office of Technology Transfer showcases innovations at national conferences to identify prospective licensing partners to transform inventions into impactful products.

The conference brings together defense, private industry, federal agencies and academia together to accelerate state-of-the-art technology solutions that will safeguard national security. Typically, the conference is held in a city, but this year it is virtual because of COVID-19.

Other technologies UCF will showcase at the conference Nov. 17-19 are:

• An autograft-extracting device for autologous osteochondral transplantation.

Engineering Professor Sang-Eun Song developed a bone and/or cartilage removal device to harvest a precisely defined autologous graft for mosaicplasty, a technique in which bone and cartilage (‘osteochondral’) lesions are repaired by harvesting and transplanting cylindrical plugs of bone and cartilage.

• Uncooled Frequency Selective LWIR detector for Chemical Sensing.

CREOL and NanoScience Technology Center Researcher Debashis Chanda developed a chemical sensing system that narrows emission lines of various gas molecules, which cannot be detected with present day broadband detectors.