The 2019 Cutinnovation Award winners have been announced, with an innovative oil and gas industry technology recognised as one of the excellent research outcomes at Curtin University.
SpiroPak was the overall winner of the awards with Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Professor, Chris Moran, claiming it could have the potential to save Australia’s oil and gas industry millions of dollars each year.
Using the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and 3D printing, SpiroPak draws inspiration from nature in a design that provides a more effective and energy-efficient separation of carbon dioxide from natural gas in LNG processing.
The technology was developed by Dr Tejas Bhatelia and a team of researchers at Curtin’s Western Australian School of Mines: Minerals, Energy and Chemical Engineering.
Professor Moran congratulated the inspiring Curtin researchers whose innovations had been recognised at the annual awards ceremony.
“The Curtinnovation Awards aim to identify new technologies, products and services arising from the University’s world-class research and the standard of innovations being created continues to impress every year.
“SpiroPak has the potential to save Australia’s globally competitive and strategically important oil and gas industry millions of dollars every year by creating significant efficiencies in LNG processing.”
Professor Moran said the other award winners demonstrated the University’s endeavour to transform research outcomes into successful new products and services.
“Other winning projects include a device that highlights energy consumption in the family home by using a simple light display to show the real-time status of a household’s energy balance, and a thermal battery that enables low-cost storage of energy at generation sites and across the electricity grid,” Professor Moran said.
“Further successful projects include an initiative that allows organisations to create strategies and action plans to enhance employee wellbeing, a processing technique that creates a new high protein food ingredient for use in vegetarian and vegan food products and a web app that semi-automates the screening of thousands of academic papers by academics and researchers, reducing screening time from hundreds of hours to just a few.”
