Environment Challenge Fund 2018 in Bangladesh

Challenge Fund is a competitive process, intended to solve a national problem, where the wining innovative ideas or projects will be awarded a fund or grant for implementing the solution.

The purpose of Challenge Fund is to

• Address and seek solutions of the problems which are seemingly unsolvable.
• Involve general people to find solutions of these problems.
• Create enthusiasm among the people of a fair competition and winning awards and recognition in solving national problems.
• Trigger early stage nationwide scalable innovation and offer required financial and technical support.

Challenge – 1: Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) Online Monitoring System

Challenge – 2: River Water Quality Monitoring Using Sensors

Judging Criteria
The prize will be awarded, at the end of the contest, to the application who in the opinion of the jury demonstrate a solution (which is at least a system prototype demonstrated in an operational environment) that best addresses the cumulative criteria for “Efficiency”, “Reliability” and “Innovative Design”. The following criteria are available but not limited options for the jury:
 The proposed solution should have a minimal negative impact on the environment; sustainability will be considered throughout the whole life-cycle of the proposed solution
from production to disposal.
 The proposed solution is expected to be at a working prototype stage and be demonstrated in a relevant environment. This development stage refers to the sensor device as a whole, including data acquisition, collection, transmission, readiness, dispersion, analysis, report generation, user management, etc.
 The proposed solution should operate autonomously throughout the required period of time, accounting for irregularities in the energy source, environmental conditions, and decay of materials.
 The proposed solution is expected to be easily deployable, configurable and disposable, with only minimal human intervention required in the operational environment. In this sense, remotely controlled or self-tuning devices will be favored, since the limitations that make water environments unfeasible for battery-operated devices are also likely to be a barrier for maintenance operations.
 Robustness of the materials used in each component of the device should be able to withstand the conditions expected in the relevant environment (e.g. temperature, pressure, humidity) for the desired amount of time.
 The proposed solution should demonstrate significant improvements in terms of portability of the solution both in terms of design (potential for application in different settings e.g. monitor other parameters or operate in different environments) and software compatibility with major operating systems and browsers. The openness of the solution (i.e. open APIs and Level of APIs with more flexible controls) will play a vital role in the judging process
 Data quality must be ensured
 Interoperability, such that the infrastructure can be shared across different utilities, e.g. the water utilities, energy utilities, will be an asset.
 The solutions should be tested under a wide range of conditions within its setting in order to account for the variability of natural environments and infrastructural differences across the country.
 Following criteria will be considered for the two divisions – Software and Hardware:
– Software: interoperability of systems, harmonization of software development, processing algorithms and storage technologies that enable to deal with increasing amounts of data;
– Hardware: rational increasing number of sensors to collect real-time and near real-time information and to its power supply.
 The solution must full-fill all the system requirements.
 The solution must full-fill the criteria for sensor data & required detected value.