Engineering Excellence for the Energy Transition — NTUA's Chem-E-Car World Title
Student excellence at international level remains a cornerstone of NTUA's contribution to the engineering of the energy transition. On 2 November 2025, the 'CHAOS' team of the NTUA School of Chemical Engineering won 1st place at the global Chem-E-Car Competition, held in Boston within the framework of the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting. Competing against 53 teams from around the world, the NTUA team's chemically powered vehicle covered the required distance of 19.54 metres with a deviation of only 4 cm, an exceptional level of precision in a discipline that demands rigorous control over reaction kinetics, energy release and propulsion design. The achievement is especially meaningful in the context of the 2025 rule change prohibiting voltage regulators, which forced participants to design more robust, intrinsically stable propulsion systems and rewarded the most creative engineering solutions. The CHAOS title builds on a sustained tradition of NTUA participation in the Chem-E-Car competition since 2016, with previous distinctions including 3rd place in 2024 (San Diego) and 5th place in 2019 (Orlando), alongside 1st place at the National Chem-E-Car Competitions of 2019 (Athens) and 2024 (Thessaloniki). Together with the consecutive successes of NTUA teams at the ASHRAE International Student Design Competition (2nd place 2021, 3rd place 2024), the 2025 world title confirms NTUA's position as one of the European technical universities most consistently represented and most consistently distinguished, at the leading international student engineering forums.
