Wei Ping Lam, a second-year doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering (ChBE) at Rice University, has won first prize in the international Shell.ai Hackathon for Sustainable and Affordable Energy.
![Headshot of Wei Ping](/sites/g/files/bxs3566/files/inline-images/1123-Wei-Ping-at-Rice.jpg)
Lam pitched his digital solution at the Changemakers of Tomorrow event held Oct. 10-12 at the Shell Technology Centre in Bangalore, India, in the Agricultural Waste Challenge category. The challenge was to predict residual biomass availability within the state of Gujarat, India, and design a low-cost supply-chain network for biofuel production.
Lam took advantage of satellite data on rainfall and agricultural production in Gujarat for high-accuracy predictions.
He then reformulated the multi-faceted supply-chain optimization problem into a single-objective one:
“Looking at the data,” Lam said, “I realized the transportation costs of residual biomass are much less than its under-utilization costs. Therefore, biorefineries and depots must operate at maximum capacity, implying zero under-utilization costs, which may further be reduced by placing depots close to refineries.”
“This method,” he said, “combined with high-performance computing gave amazing results. I also proposed the idea of a collaboration platform where experts help scale and deploy the solution.”
Lam earned his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2022. He works in the research group of Haotian Wang, associate professor of ChBE, focusing on electrochemical CO2 conversion.