NUS ME team wins IES’ Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award for project on smart utilities plant

Image: (from left) IES President Mr Edwin Khew, Dr M Kum Ja, Dr Md Raisul Islam, A/Prof Ernest Chua, Senior Minister of State for Defence Mr Heng Chee How, Prof Ng Kim Choon (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), Dr Bui Duc Thuan

The NUS Mechanical Engineering team, led by Associate Professor Ernest Chua Kian Jon, received the Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award 2018 by the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES), in recognition of their outstanding engineering project, “4-in-1 Smart Utilities Plant Tailored for Tropics”. The award was presented to the team at the 12th International Conference on Ceramic Materials and Components for Energy and Environmental Applications (CMCEE 2018)’s Conference Dinner, held on 26 July 2018 at the Raffles Convention Centre, Singapore.

The 4-in-1 SMART utilities plant paves the way for a more environmentally friendly and cost-effective way of producing key essentials for daily living, namely, electricity, water, air-conditioning and heat. This novel system is suitable for housing and building clusters, as well as underground cities, especially those in the tropics. Running four independent processes results in extensive energy wastage and such systems take up a huge floor area. With this smart plant, these processes are carefully integrated together such that waste energy can be harvested for useful output. Overall, this novel approach is able to reduce energy usage by 25 to 30 per cent and the 4-in-1 plant is also comparatively more compact.

More information on the technology: http://news.nus.edu.sg/press-releases/smart-utilities-plant

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