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Invitation of Applications for the
Second Round of the
Theme-based Research Scheme
Research
Grants Council (RGC) Chairman Professor Roland Chin said that the
vetting of the first round of the Theme-based Research Scheme had been
successfully completed. Six projects have been funded on the basis of
their academic excellence, and are relevant to the strategic importance
of the long-term development of Hong Kong.
Four of the six awarded projects revolve around the theme of ‘Promoting
Good Health’. They include ‘The Liver Cancer Genome Project:
Translating Genetic Discoveries to Clinical Benefits’; ‘Massively
Parallel Sequencing of Plasma Nucleic Acids for the Molecular
Diagnostics of Cancers’; ‘Personalized Medicine for Cardiovascular
Diseases: From Genomic Testing and Biomarkers to Human Pluripotent Stem
Cell Platform’; and ‘Cell-based Heart Regeneration’. The other two
projects – ‘Challenges in Organic Photo-Voltaics and Light Emitting
Diodes – A Concerted Multi- Disciplinary and Multi-Institutional
Effort’ and ‘Transforming Hong Kong’s Ocean Container Transport
Logistics Network’ – are on the respective theme of ‘Developing a
Sustainable Environment’ and ‘Enhancing Hong Kong’s Strategic Position
as a Regional and International Business Centre’.
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Partial Nitrification from Ammonia to Nitrite by Enriched
Ammonia- oxidizing Archaea in Sewage
Ammonia
is one of the major pollutants existing in sewage. The major removal
process for ammonia is biological nitrification which is a two-step
process including oxidation of ammonia to nitrite and further oxidation
of nitrite to nitrate. It is widely used together with denitrification,
which reduces nitrate/nitrite to nitrogen gas, in wastewater treatment
plants (WWTPs) to achieve nitrogen removal target for environmental
protection.
For a long time, a group of bacteria, called ammonia- oxidizing Bacteria
(AOB) have been thought to be mainly responsible for the oxidation of
ammonia in WWTPs and natural environments until it was found a few
years ago that ammonia-oxidizing Archaea (AOA) is another major player
and may contribute even more to oxidation of ammonia to nitrite than
AOB. AOA is diverse and abundant in various natural environments, such
as sediment, soil, estuary and seawater.
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FlexiBOL®: Flexible Street Bollard and
Railing System for New and Changing Urban Environment
Street functions have
become increasingly dynamic in recent years. Streets are used daily by
pedestrians and vehicular traffic, but also serve a number of other
functions, such as serving as the locale for irregular or even
unexpected events. Hong Kong residents are familiar with a host of
events that take place on the territory’s streets, for example, the Lunar New Year Night
Parade, the Hong Kong Marathon and political rallies. Many thousands of
people gather on the streets to participate in these events or simply
to take a peep at the action, thus requiring the Police and the
Transport Department to implement a number of crowd management
measures, including closing walkways and roads and rerouting traffic.
Controlling crowds and managing the flow of traffic not only require a
significant amount of manpower, but also the adjustment of such street
furniture as bollard and railing systems. Existing bollard and railing
designs, however, are not sufficiently flexible to allow these
adjustments to be made with ease.
In collaboration with the Hong Kong
Highways Department, related government departments and social
organisations, Prof K W Michael Siu has led a team of researchers and
designers in carrying out applied research projects whose aim is to
generate flexible design solutions to meet today’s continuously
changing urban needs. On the basis of longterm site observations and
product analysis of existing street furniture, the research team has
developed a set of bollards and railings designed to meet the needs of
Hong Kong and other densely populated metropolitan areas.
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Development of Highly Efficient Semiconductor Nanoparticles
as Photocatalysts for the Degradation of Organic Pollutants in Water
under Visible Light
The
amount of organic pollutants in wastewaters discharged by various
industries is increasing every year and is causing serious global
environmental problems. These pollutants include a wide range of
persistent organic chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals and
endocrine-disrupting compounds. We are now faced with the challenge of
removing these compounds from their effluents before they are
discharged. In this regard, photocatalysis is a promising technology
for wastewater treatment as it offers many advantages over conventional
and other advanced treatment options. Traditional physical techniques
(adsorption on activated carbon, ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, coagulation by chemical
agents, ion exchange on synthetic adsorbent resins, etc.) have been
used for the removal of these pollutants, but these methods only
succeed in transferring organic compounds from water to another phase, thus creating secondary
pollution. Microbiological or enzymatic decomposition, biodegradation,
ozonation and advanced oxidation processes such as Fenton (Fe2+ +
H2O2), photo-Fenton (Fe2+ + H2O2 + UV), H2O2/ UV processes have also
been used for organic pollutants removal from wastewaters, but these
methods are either ineffective or too expensive. On the other hand,
photocatalysis is energy saving and is able to completely oxidize the
organic pollutants to water and carbon dioxide. Metal oxide
semiconductor nanoparticles have been used as high activity
photocatalysts; such as ZnO, TiO2, CdS, Fe2O3 and HNbO3. These
semiconductors, however, can only be excited by UV light due to their
large band gaps. For better utilization of sunlight and indoor
illumination, it is desirable to develop photocatalysts that can be
excited by visible light.
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Coupled Heat and Mass Transfer in Passive Silicon-based
Direct Methanol Fuel Cells
The
topic:
Environmental concerns and sustainable development call for a new
generation of energy-conversion technologies to replace the existing
fossil-fuel, combustion-based energy systems. Due to their inherent
advantages, such as high efficiency and low/zero emission, fuel cells
have become one of the most attractive energy-conversion technologies. Hydrogen is the cleanest and
most efficient fuel for fuel cells. However, the widespread
commercialization of hydrogen-fed fuel cells is limited by the significant challenges in the production,
transportation and storage of pure hydrogen. Liquid methanol is an
ideal alternative to hydrogen. This hydrogen-rich fuel offers multiple
advantages over pure hydrogen, including higher energy density and ease
of transport, storage and handling. For this reason, interest in
developing direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) has grown rapidly all
over the world in the past decade.
One of the key challenges to the
widespread commercialization of this type of fuel cell, however, is its
low power density. In addition to the sluggish electrochemical
oxidation of methanol and the methanol crossover problem, two
challenging problems lead to low power densities in conventional DMFCs.
One is the cell’s inability to handle the crossing over of excess water
that evolves during fuel cell operation to the cathode. The other is
that conventional designs render too much heat loss, resulting in a
rather low cell operating temperature. Solving these two problems
requires extra attention to be given to thermal and water management.
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Liquid-filled Glazing Technology
In
buildings, glazing plays an important role in influencing energy
demands and lighting requirements. The interrelation between
fenestration design and thermal/visual performance has been
receiving much attentions. As a matter of fact, extensivelyglazed
buildings from commercial complexes to residences are common in modern
architecture for their lightness and good exterior appearance. But this
design trend intensifies the solar heat gain and therefore the
air-conditioning electricity consumptions. Most buildings in the warm
climate are singleglazed, with clear glass offered for residential
developments and absorptive/reflective glass for commercial
applications. Alternatively, ventilated double-glazing with a stream of
air flowing through the glazing cavity can be used. For the warm
climate region, solar heat absorption by the air stream has no direct
application value. Instead, solar heat absorption via a liquid water
stream can be readily transferred to a domestic hot water system. In
this study, the system performance of liquid-filled double glazing
integrated with a water-heater has been investigated. Figure 1 shows
the working principle. The cavity in a double-pane glazing is
incorporated with water inlet and outlet headers at its lower and upper
ends. Together with a water-to-water heat exchanger at the
top and the interconnecting tubing at the side (all are housed in the
window frame), this forms a fully-enclosed water circuit. The heat
conversion to another water stream via the heat exchanger allows the
full utilization of the absorbed solar heat.
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A Novel Magnetic-geared
Electronic-continuously
Variable Transmission Propulsion System
for Hybrid Electric Vehicles
With
ever increasing concern on energy efficiency and environmental
protection, there is fast-growing interest in hybrid electric vehicles
(HEVs). Differing from batterypowered electric vehicles, HEVs involve
two energy sources, namely the gasoline and the battery, as well as two
propulsion devices, namely the engine and the motor. Hence, they take
the definite advantages that they can offer a much longer driving range
and be easily refueled at existing gas stations. Their key challenge is
how to effectively combine the engine driving force and the motor
driving force in such a way that the engine can always operate at its
optimal efficiency and produce the minimum tailpipe exhaust. The
existing HEVs essentially adopt the same technology, termed the
planetary-geared electronic-continuously variable transmission (E-CVT)
propulsion system, to combine the engine driving force and the motor
driving force. However, this system suffers from the drawbacks of low
power density, high transmission loss, wear-and-tear problem and
annoying audible noise.
Rather than using physical contacts to perform force transmission as
adopted by mechanical gears, magnetic gears can transmit the force
using contactless magnetic attraction. The use of coaxial arrangement
can further enable magnetic gears to simultaneously utilize all magnets
for force transmission. By purposely designing the modulating ring of
the magnetic gear to be rotatable, it can work as the planetary gear
for power splitting. Namely, the engine power flow can be split into two paths – one path is via the
outer rotor of the magnetic gear (shared with the rotor of the motor)
while another path is via the inner rotor of the magnetic gear (shared
with the rotor of the generator). The corresponding power flow is
controlled by using two back-to-back converters separately coupled to
the stators of the motor and the generator. Increasingly, both the
motor and the generator can be integrated into the magnetic gear to
form a single machine unit. By artfully controlling the converters to
perform power splitting, effective E-CVT propulsion can be achieved.
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Areas of Excellence Scheme Project:
Achievement Summary of The Institute of Molecular Technology for Drug Discovery and Synthesis
The
Institute of Molecular Technology for Drug Discovery and Synthesis
(IMT) is established under the Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme
administered by the University Grants Committee (UGC) of the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region. IMT has led Hong Kong to become a
leading research center for drug discovery and synthesis by the
following means: Identification of anticancer metal-based drug leads
Through
this project, Hong Kong has become a center
with international reputation in research on Metal Based Drugs.
Libraries of bioactive compounds of gold, ruthenium, platinum and
rhodium with promising anticancer activities have been created. In
particular, the anticancer gold compounds gold- 1a, gold- 2a and gold- 3d
identified in this project show exceptionally good in vivo activities
for killing drug resistant cancer cells and with much higher potencies
than the clinically-used cisplatin. Gold- 2a shows significant
inhibition to tumor growth of breast cancer in vivo with no
apparent toxic side effect. Gold- 3d shows anticancer property toward
hepatocellular and nasopharyngeal carcinoma in nude mice and rat
models. Preclinical safety pharmacological evaluations, including acute
toxicity and genotoxicity studies on gold- 3d, have revealed promising
results. Potential molecular targets of these gold drug leads,
including topoisomerases, roteasome, deubiquitinating enzymes,
HDAC, Bcl-2, Wnt, TrxR and Fas, were identified by a combination
of computational, transcriptomics and proteomics techniques. The
international pharmaceutical companies Servier (France) and Goldebv
Biotech (Taiwan) have agreed to co-develop or have provided
sponsorships to develop these drug leads. Three patents have been
granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office and one patent has been
granted by Taiwan Intellectual Property Office on Metals in Medicines.
The Inorganic Medicines has drawn substantial attention from
and stimulated active researches in various tertiary institutions to
develop this research field in Hong Kong.
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Areas of Excellence Scheme Project:
Molecular Neuroscience: Basic Research and Drug Discovery
As
the proportion of the world’s elderly population increases, the number
of people afflicted with brain diseases is similarly increasing since
most of these are age-related conditions. Age-related brain diseases
such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease already represent a
leading cause of mortality in the elderly with enormous social burden,
but despite their rising incidence, there are few approved drugs in the
market to effectively cure these ailments. In some cases, they are not
effective in all patients or exhibit side-effects, while in other cases,
they merely alleviate the symptoms of the disease. Hence, the
development of effective therapeutic drugs to treat diseases of the
brain is of paramount importance.
The main obstacle towards developing treatments for brain diseases is
the lack of a clear understanding of the disease. The complex and
delicate biological processes within both the normal and diseased brain
must be understood at a molecular level, and specific molecular targets
linked to different disease states have to be identified. As a means to
address this, in 2001, a cross-institutional research project led by
the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) was
allocated HK$26.8 million from the University Grants Committee (UGC)
Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme to conduct a five-year project on
“Molecular Neuroscience: Basic Research and Drug Discovery”.
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