HKUST Postgraduates Win HKIE Innovation Award Grand Prize

Mr. Tsui To-Hung and Dr. Hao Tian-Wei have received the Grand Prize of the 2016 HKIE Innovation Awards for Young Members (Category I) for their innovative work on developing cost-effective technologies for wastewater treatment. The prestigious award is open to all young engineers and HKIE members across all engineering fields in Hong Kong. This is the first time a student team has won the award.

To design and develop a modern high-rate wastewater treatment process requires a strong grasp of both microbiology and hydrodynamics, and further optimizing the process poses theoretical and computational challenges as wastewater is characteristically complex. Mr. Tsui and Dr. Hao were able to break through from such challenges and other past limitations and develop a simple yet effective method to reengineer conventional anaerobic bioreactors. Their invention increases operational flexibility but reduces complications in building bioreactors. A long-term evaluation on improvement in performance has since been carried out.

Mr. Tsui received his BEng in Civil and Environmental Engineering from HKUST in 2013. He is currently a CIVL PhD candidate supervised by Prof. Guang-hao Chen. His research interests include developing efficient wastewater treatment methods and ways to recover resources such as heavy metals from waste streams. Dr. Hao is a postdoctoral research fellow at HKUST.