Emerging Technology

Stainless steel (SS) is one of the most extensively used materials in public areas and hygiene facilities but has no inherent antimicrobial properties. Additionally, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits strong stability on regular SS surfaces, with viable viruses detected even after three days. This has created a high possibility of virus transmission among people using these areas and facilities.

Current surface disinfection methods include spraying chemicals or using UV light. However, it is difficult to directly spray liquid chemicals on surfaces due to the threat of negative environmental impacts and possible damage and contamination to various surfaces such as books and food packages. Currently, UV based disinfection lights are either wall mounted or operate on mobile bases. Moreover, they are often positioned metres away from surfaces that require disinfection.

The housing shortage is a well-recognized challenge in Hong Kong. To meet the huge and growing needs, productivity and on-time delivery facilitated by modern building technology and decision support platforms in housing projects are crucial. Besides, e-commerce has grown very fast recently. Professor Huang’s team developed cyber-physical systems including both hardware and software solutions for construction and e-commerce logistics industries.

Human skin can sense subtle changes of both normal and shear forces as well as perceive stimulus with finer resolution than the average spacing between mechanoreceptors. By contrast, existing tactile sensors for robotic applications are inferior, lacking both accurate force decoupling and proper spatial resolution. This project aims at developing skin-alike soft tactile sensors based on principles of magnetic fields.

Low-grade heat, which is abundantly available in the environment and even in human body, is always wasted without use. Direct Thermal Charging Cell (DTCC) is invented for efficient heat-to-electricity conversion yielding a conversion efficiency over 5%, which surpasses all existing thermo-electrochemical and thermo-electric systems in low-grade heat regime.