HIGHLIGHTS
RESEARCH IMPACT & COLLABORATIONS
ExxonMobil Industry Talk 2024 - Technology solutions for energy transitions
On 26 February 2024, ExxonMobil held an industry talk for CDE with over 160 attendees, including undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and academics.
Our students and staff had the privilege of hearing from Dr Rob Crane, who spent over 20 years working at ExxonMobil, leading the advancement of high-impact technologies through leadership roles in research, engineering, manufacturing, new business development, and strategy. Dr Crane focuses on scaling technologies that reduce carbon intensity and greenhouse gas emissions.
To meet the world's ambitions for economic growth and lower emissions, Dr Crane emphasised the need for the advancement and deployment of a broad set of technologies at scale. He outlined three low-carbon solutions areas that ExxonMobil focuses on for solutions to the energy transition: carbon capture & storage, hydrogen, and biofuels.
Dr Crane noted that each area offers multiple solutions that could play a role in the push for lower emissions. And it is not a case of finding the best solution in each. “We need every solution that we can get so that we can take advantage of geographically varied resources and find the best locations and opportunities to deploy them,” said Dr Crane. This opens up opportunities for both research and employment in these areas to help build and develop these solutions.
When asked what ExxonMobil looks for in potential collaborators, Dr Crane stated, “We look for complementary capabilities. We look for people who think differently from us and bring new ideas or people who have capabilities that we don’t have.”
One of the attendees at Dr Crane’s talk was Chemical Engineering undergraduate Poon Zhong Yi. When asked about his takeaways, Zhong Yi said, “Dr Crane’s talk was very informative and provided greater context to the ExxonMobil research and reports I’ve read online. It was also great to see that what I am currently studying in my degree is aligned with the opportunities available at ExxonMobil.”
Thanks to ExxonMobil, our students have had the privilege of learning from passionate and experienced industry experts. Their unwavering support has been invaluable in helping us inspire and transform the next generation of leaders.
Advancements in material design for high-performance spintronic memory devices
Innovative technologies that can accommodate the burgeoning volume of digital information the world generates, without compromising on computing performance or sustainability, are increasingly needed. Such innovations require the development of memory and storage solutions that strike a balance between cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency, steadfast stability, and scalability.
Spintronics-based memory devices, which leverage a magnetic property of electrons known as electron spin, provide an attractive solution to meet these demands. Unlike conventional electronics, which primarily rely on the manipulation of electron charge, spintronics devices use electron spin, an intrinsic angular momentum of electrons that determines their alignment. Manipulating the electron spin can be used to encode and process information. Such devices show tremendous potential to create more efficient, faster, and low-power memory technologies.
Seeking such solutions is Professor Yang Hyunsoo; an expert in spintronics-based memory devices, terahertz spintronics and unconventional computing, Prof Yang turned to two-dimensional (2D) materials in his search for materials that could form the foundation of future spintronics-based technologies.
In an article published recently in Nature Materials, Prof Yang explored the potential of specific 2D materials in spintronic-based memory devices.
Read more at: Yang Hyunsoo Advancements in Material Design for High-Performance Spintronic Memory Devices (nus.edu.sg)
Major Grants Awarded
The major grants (start date in February 2024) with total project value > $1M.
| Hosting Unit | Project Title | Funding Programme (Source of Funding) |
Principal Investigator | Co-Investigator |
| CEE | DEVELOPMENT AND DEMONSTRATION OF A NOVEL FLOATING HYBRID TIDAL-WAVE ENERGY SYSTEM | NRF-MOST JOINT GRANT ON CLEAN ENERGY - 2023
(NRF) |
LOW YING MIN | LI YUZHU, PEARL; KOH CHAN GHEE |
| ECE | PIEZO SPECIALTY LAB-IN-FAB 2.0 (LIF 2.0) - ENABLING UNRIVALLED POWER EFFICIENT TRANSDUCERS BEYOND MATERIAL LIMITS | INDUSTRY ALIGNMENT FUND - INDUSTRY COLLABORATION PROJECTS (IAF-ICP) - 2023
(A*STAR) |
LEE CHENGKUO | JERALD YOO |