Research - Bosch Awarded its First Round of Research Grants

Totaling nearly $1 million and also provided funds for over 40 internships, strengthening its long-standing investment in the development of energy-efficient technologies, as well as its support of leading US universities.

After a competitive grant selection process in 2011, the Bosch Energy Research Network (BERN) has awarded seven grants to researchers at five leading US universities, providing seed funding for cutting-edge energy research. As announced last May during the company’s 125th anniversary year, Bosch is investing more than $10 million over eight years to support universities and energy research in North America.

BERN is part of the global Bosch InterCampus pro- gram, an initiative in which the company will invest about $70 million (EUR50 million) to support universities and research programs focused on sustainable energy usage in Germany, China, India and the US over ten years.

BERN will fund more than 25 university research grants over its duration, with the goal of developing transformative energy technologies for series production.

The selected proposals were: • Band-Structure Designed Photovoltaic Materials aims to develop high-efficiency solar cells based on earth-abundant material with tailored band structures.

Principal Investigator: Professor Tonio Buonassisi, MIT, Boston, USA.

• Brushless, Self-Excited Synchronous Field- winding Machine seeks to develop low-cost, high- performance electric motor technology that utilizes exclusively earth-abundant materials.

Principal Investigator: Professor Heath Hofmann, University of Michigan, USA.

• Coordinated Aggregation of Distributed Resources for the Smart Grid develops architecture and control methods to efficiently manage the future electricity grid, addressing the challenge of incre- ased variability from renewable sources. This will be done by clustering many small, independent units so that they can be controlled in a coherent manner, transforming them into active resources for electric grid management.

Principal Investigator: Professor Kameshwar Poolla, University of California, Berkeley, USA.