Dr Ronald Muhumuza

PhD, MSc, BSc

  • Research Associate in Decarbonisation of Low Temperature Process Heat Industry

Background

Ronald’s postdoctoral work at Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) commenced in 2021 and focuses on developing heat storage and recovery solutions to bring distributed thermal storage concepts for decarbonising low temperature heat in industrial processes to fruition.

He holds BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Makerere University (Uganda:2006), MSc Sustainable Engineering: Renewable Energy Systems and the Environment from University of Strathclyde (UK: 2010), and PhD on Solar polygeneration for access to energy in off-grid rural households in developing countries from Ulster University (Belfast, UK: 2020). Ronald’s PhD was funded by the Department for Education (DfE), Northern Ireland, UK. His work contributed extensive research on the energy consumption front in the frame of Sustainable Development Goal #7. It delivered novel solar polygeneration concepts with PV and reflector based (planer and line-axis CPCs) solar thermal, ray-tracing simulations, techno-economic studies, and extensive experiments using a large-scale solar simulator.

Associated work earned the best literature review prize (2019) at Ulster University. As a recognised professional member of the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE), he is committed in solving energy efficiency challenges in various end use applications and developing approaches for mitigating climate change. As research associate at Ulster University, he worked on various multidisciplinary research, consultancy and prototyping projects including solar barrier films in ice-cream vending freezers (Unilever, 2020), roofing PowerPanels with integrated photovoltaic cells (Kingspan, 2020), smart mobile solar-storage with embedded LoRaWAN technologies (UKRI SolaNetwork project, 2021), and solar-storage for energy access, energy efficiency and grid stability (UKRI SwanaSmartStore project, 2021).

He has also been in a higher education lectureship position at Busitema University in Uganda, delivering mechanical engineering science courses. Over the years, he has professionally performed technical and non-technical work in various sectors including hydropower, consultancy, and beverage manufacturing, where he conducted industrial electrical energy audits, implemented ISO9001, and managed production line operations. Ronald often conducts voluntary peer review activities for various journals in Elsevier and Springer nature group.