The Centre for Low Carbon Transport (LoCARtic) at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) recently received funding for two projects on energy recovery.

The Centre is a collaboration between the Malaysian university and Imperial College London. Dr Srithar Rajoo, a visiting academic in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial, is the director of the Centre at UTM, with Professor Ricardo Martinez-Botas acting as co-director from Imperial.

In March, LoCARtic was awarded funding from the Malaysia Electricity Supply Industries Trust Account (MESITA) for a three-year project worth £1,358,695 for Imperial and 21M Ringgit (around £4M) in total. UTM, Imperial and Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) are partners in the project, which aims to develop a framework for renewable centric microgrids capable of local energy recovery in Malaysia.

The Centre received another significant grant in January from the Malaysia-Thailand Joint Authority (MTJA) to work on energy recovery in oil platforms through waste heat recovery. Imperial will receive £1,067,062 funding from a total grant of USD$4.89M, the largest single fund awarded by the MTJA so far.

LoCARtic began as a collaboration facilitated by the first Malaysian PhD graduates from the Turbochargers group at Imperial. The Centre, inaugurated by Imperial president Alice Gast in 2014, was set up with base funding for five years and opened a second site in Malaysia a year later.

“We are now gathering the fruits of the initial work and focusing on delivery and people”, says Professor Ricardo Martinez-Botas, who leads the Turbochargers research group.