The next thing you know, we’ll be driving flying cars that run on bananas for fuel – yup, that was a ‘Back To The Future’ movie reference. Speaking of super cool fuels, let’s talk about hydrogen fuel, the “other-other” fuel that’s becoming more and more known to everyone in the clean-energy playground. Especially in the Shell Eco Marathon competition this year, where a group of students from UBD, Team GenNEXT Pejuang, built a race car from scratch as their Discovery Year project, which runs solely on hydrogen fuel.
What started in 1939 at a Shell research lab in the United States, where scientists were competing for fuel efficiency of their vehicles, has since then become SEMA (Shell Eco Marathon Asia). The competition has grown and spread to Asia and Europe including many different energy types, and sparks passionate debate around the future of energy and mobility.
If you’re wondering who’s on the team, say hello to the 5 dreamers and doers: Md Khairul Zhafri Haji Md Noor, Team Manager from the Faculty of Science, Nur Amirah Salamat (1st Driver) from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Ak Hj Md Saiful Hakimin Pg Hj Duraman (2nd Driver) from the Faculty of Integrated Technologies, Muhammad Atta Ataullah Abd Rahman from the Faculty of Integrated Technologies, Irzy Tuah from the Faculty of Integrated Technologies and Nazurah Mohd Noor from the UBD School of Business & Economics.
This year, over 120 student-teams from 17 countries across the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa – including new entrants from Australia, Bangladesh, Oman and Saudi Arabia joined in to do their part in designing and building their own clean-energy racecar.
If you didn’t already know, UBD’s flagship GenNEXT initiative is a broad-based trans disciplinary programme, designed for students to excel based on their individual learning styles (everyone’s unique – just like you). So since its inception in 2009, UBD students have been doing well in their studies and developed leadership plus entrepreneurial skills through experiential learning – looks like we could be driving flying cars sooner than later after all huh? Now, that’s bananas.
