Clean water and energy are vital for human activity and socio-economic development. This project focuses on developing more effective reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration (NF) membranes and processes. Professor Tang’s team has pioneered the development of nano-foaming theory and interlayer structure to regulate membranes with excellent performance.
An immersive virtual reality-based exercise system was developed to support poststroke upper limb exercises. In a 2-week randomized controlled trial, fifty patients used the system for exercises (intervention) or a sham entertainment program (control). The findings demonstrate that the system can improve shoulder joint motion and is safe and acceptable.
To address challenges and future developments in structural engineering, Dr. Wang has developed a deep-learning-based platform, which contains (1) physics-informed neural networks (EPINN) for structural simulation and (2) state-of-the-art neural operator (VINO) for structural health monitoring.
The spread of pathogenic microorganisms in public spaces poses a great threat to human health.
Professor Leung’s team develops a system using far ultraviolet C (UVC) light (wavelength: 222nm) for surface and air disinfection in an actual environment without affecting the normal usage of the area.
Many studies indicated that Far UVC will not create harmful effect on testing creatures such as mice. To further strengthen the safety use of the device for disinfection, the system will not irradiate far UVC light in the presence of people in the area so it will be totally safe in using it.
DipµChip is an automated capillary microfluidic-based point-of-care (POC) microsystem allowing rapid and portable detection of various high-impact and mortality diseases, such as pneumonia, sepsis, malaria, and COVID-19. Our Mission is “Empowering access to adequate clinical care for high-impact disease patients using molecular biology and point-of-care microfluidics.” End-users of DipµChip include clinics, hospitals, homes, and assisted living healthcare facilities, democratizing access to adequate clinical care, and saving precious lives of patients in need.
The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing demands from Big Data are hampered by current hardware performance, spurring extensive research into accelerator chips. As silicon transistors reach physical limits, there is an urgent need to explore new computing paradigms based on unconventional devices.
Dr Li’s team is developing new brain-inspired computing paradigms using emerging memory devices, aiming to showcase the potential of these neuromorphic computing systems in laboratory settings.
• Labor shortage impacts garment factories and labor-intensive industries.
• Automation helps workers focus on higher value-added tasks.
• Industrial systems face challenges in automating textile handling.
Practical realization of quantum devices calls for the placement of individual qubits on complex nanophotonic circuits. However, this prerequisite continues to suffer from coarse positioning accuracy, low throughput, and process complexity. We developed a novel nanoprinting scheme that allows the controllable placement of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center nanodiamonds at the quantum level. The scheme enables remarkable achievements that are not attainable by other approaches: (1) single-quantum level quantity control, (2) sub-wavelength positional accuracy, and (3) scalable, ‘lithography-free’ patterning capability. We believe this work to be a game-changer, as it directly addresses the key technological challenge associated with the realization of quantum devices. The patent for this invention has been filed (US 63/236,411, PCT Application No. PCT/CN2022/113516).
Tropical forests are the largest terrestrial component of the global carbon cycle, storing about 250 Giga tons (Gt) biomass carbon in their woody vegetation and absorbing ~70 Gt CO2 per year through photosynthesis. Loss of forests could be devastating because not only the stored carbon stocks in biomass and soil are losing but also the function of sequestering atmospheric carbon.
Although widely used in our daily life, lithium (Li) -ion batteries fall short because the materials used are often scarce, toxic, and expensive. They also have safety issue in operation due to their organic based electrolytes. Beyond lithium-ion batteries, a low-cost magnesium (Mg) metal anode based aqueous Mg-ion battery has been developed first time by Professor Dennis Leung’s research team in the HKU Department of Mechanical Engineering. As Mg is the 5th most abundant metal element in the earth’s crust (three orders of magnitude more than Li), the advantages of low cost and non-toxicity make Mg a desirable alternative to Li as the anode material. The proposed battery shows a high discharge plateau of 2.4-2.0 V and an excellent rechargeability for over 700 stable cycles. This high operation voltage exceeds the counterpart of other multivalent-ion batteries, including zinc (Zn) metal and aluminum (Al) metal batteries. The mechanism behind was also revealed, where a conductive metallic oxide layer was facilitated by the chloride (Cl-) ions inside the water-in-salt electrolyte, providing ionic pathways for rechargeable battery operations. The team hopes that the chemical insights obtained in this work could inspire further optimization and bring attention to the overlooked development of rechargeable aqueous Mg metal batteries. This work uncovers the once dismissed possibility of aqueous Mg metal batteries and opens a new avenue in the field of post-lithium-ion batteries. Other project team members are Dr. Wending Pan (Research Assistant Professor) and Miss Sarah Leong (PhD student).