TECH OFFERS

Reclaimed water is a critical source of water in Singapore and globally. Common practical limit of existing technology based on microfiltration/ultrafiltration-membrane bioreactor (MF/UF-MBR) and reverse osmosis (RO) for water reclamation has 75-85% recovery due to RO membrane fouling. This technology presents a hybrid system consisting of a high retention nanofiltration-membrane bioreactor (NF-MBR) and RO developed to achieve ≥90% of water recovery. NF-MBR produces superior quality effluent because the NF membrane can retain low molecular weight organics and scale forming divalent ions. Thus, membrane fouling in downstream RO process can be alleviated significantly, which allows higher recovery.

Syngas is a valuable feedstock for energy generation and chemical synthesis. Currently, it can be produced by the gasification of locally available materials such as municipal solid waste and biomass. However, the prominent issue that arises during syngas utilisation is the high level of impurities that can damage the electricity generator and chemical reactors. In addition, current conventional syngas purification processes require quenching and wet-scrubbing stages, resulting in heat loss and increasing the costs for treating liquid waste before disposal. The proposed technology is an innovative hot purification process that can effectively remove syngas impurities to acceptable levels for downstream applications. This solution is a technology process starting with a catalytic reforming apparatus that can remove tar in high particle-loading syngas from the gasifier at high temperatures. The upgraded syngas is then treated in a desulfurisation system with regenerative sorbents for high-temperature and continuous sulfur removal. This process allows energy conservation and no liquid waste is generated. The technology owner is seeking collaboration with industry partners for research collaboration or technology licensing.

Conventional soil remediation methods, such as thermal desorption involve physical or chemical reactions to alter the physical properties of the soil for control of contaminant. These methods are costly and require the disposal of the resource, taking up space in landfills. This technology relates to a microbial formulation that has proven efficacy to treat petroleum polluted soil in the tropics. The bioaugmentation technology developed involves the addition of chemical-degrading microorganisms to the contaminated sites (e.g., oil spills) to remove the pollutant, allowing repurpose of the land, soil, and water. The process is environmentally friendly, highly portable and does not require deployment of large machinery on-site. The soil after treatment is compliant to the current United States Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA) and Australian standards (below 1,000 ppm Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH)) with proven efficacy to work in tropical climates. The technology provider is looking for collaboration for large-scale testing and deployment, or partners to test the feasibility of the treated soil for farming purposes and develop formulation for soil rehabilitation for farming and food production.

Microbial detection is the key in public health protection. Faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) such as E. coli and Bacillus spp. are used as indicators of water quality as a proxy for pathogenic faecal contamination of water, along with risk assessment techniques that correlate the frequency of a specific health hazard with a given level of FIB exposure. Chromogenic and fluorogenic enzymatic techniques are mainstays of water quality monitoring for both public health agencies and regulated utilities. However, together with traditional culture techniques, enzymatic enumeration of FIB is favoured for evaluating microbial water quality under most regulated jurisdictions. This technology utilises bioelectroanalytical approaches to FIB enumeration as it is a near universal property of microbes to indirectly reduce an electrode via soluble redox mediators. This bioelectrochemical sensor detects E. coli in the range 5.0 x 102 to 5.0 x 105 CFU/mL and provides a 22–54% faster detection than commercially available FIB detectors to detect, quantify, and track contamination of water to ensure water quality meets sanitary guidelines. The technology provider is looking for licensing partners to commercialise this technology.

This technology offers a new concept to manage wastewater and mitigate secondary contamination of wastewater treatment process through a non-chemical approach, which has been developed and translated to an integrated pilot scale water line. The current pilot line combines an electrochemical advance oxidation process (EAOP), and commercial nanobubble generation and ceramic membranes. This technology is suitable for removing particulate, organic and microbial pollutants in wastewaters, and enables a sustainable close-loop solution to support emerging urban manufacturing. Moving forward, the technology owner is looking to create a platform solution where various functional modules can be developed to be incorporated or retrofitted into current infrastructure to address emerging needs in water circularity. The technology owner is currently seeking co-development and licensing partners to commercialize this technology.

This technology offer is an integrated, CMOS-compatible, compact device that provides dispersion compensation of dispersion in optical fibers. Dispersion impairments is a well-known problem in the transmission of high-speed data over fiber, that limits both the fiber reaches, or poses lower limits on the power required. The technology developed allows a seamless, very low loss method for compensation of fiber dispersion, providing high magnitudes of dispersion for countering dispersion in optical fibers. Without dispersion compensation, signals are susceptible to degradation from optical fiber dispersion, with the extent of degradation worsening with longer fiber reaches. Without proper dispersion compensation, transmitted data will experience high Bit Error Rates (BER) at the receiver. This technology solves this important problem and increases the fiber reaches which may be served.  

Electron-beam lithography (EBL) is a form of maskless lithography tool that is widely used in nanofabrication due to its rapid-prototyping and high-resolution patterning capabilities. However, the patterning process employing EBL typically suffers from low throughput due to the patterning process of scanning across all designated pixels by a scanning focused electron beam. This technology introduces the use of plasma treatment to increase the patterning throughput for closed polygon structures in EBL process without affecting the resolution of the patterned structures, allowing the patterning efficiency of EBL to be enhanced by 50 times and above. This technology is potentially useful for manufacturers of beam lithography tool such as electron beam lithography (EBL) and focused ion beam lithography (FIB) to develop next generation lithography system for high volume fabrication equipment. In addition, this technology could also be useful in semiconductor and nanophotonic industry for rapid prototyping of photomask and photoreticle in the fabrication process which could help improve the manufacturing cost of photomask fabrication.

Leveraging on big data, businesses in the retail sector can increase their customer-centricity; by measuring customer engagement, footfall, dwell time, age and gender, businesses can gain data-driven insights into various metrics such as sales conversion rate and reveal the underlying relationship between sales, marketing, and in-store traffic. Such insights help to make sense of the reasons some retail stores outperform others and provide a valuable means of optimising marketing, product display and sales strategies. Understanding footfall data and queue times can also help to optimise staff allocation to avoid over or understaffing and enhance the overall customer experience (CX). This solution is a plug-and-play cloud-based solution for retail analytics through human behaviour analysis. The platform works with any Internet Protocol (IP) enabled camera that supports Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and is able to perform footfall counting, dwell time measurement, and engagement count on video footage that are sent over the Internet to the cloud-based platform, this allows it to readily provide an additional layer of intelligence on existing camera infrastructure and scales to the requirements of the deployment. It provides visualisation over a web dashboard, as downloadable executive reports, or through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable actionable business intelligence insights.

Due to social stigma surrounding Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD), cost barriers, and lack of awareness, a large proportion of men suffering from male health issues avoid accessing in-person medical care, instead, many men turn to online sources such as search engines or discussion forums to seek help. This further compounds the problem as this failure to seek medical attention leads to delays in diagnosis and subsequent treatment, while misinformation and misguidance from the general public can be dangerous and life-threatening. This technology aims to address the gap between crowd-sourced diagnosis and primary healthcare practitioners through a fully anonymous, AI-driven mobile application screening tool that covers 90% of genital pathologies e.g. bumps and lesions, and certain disease and viruses, such as syphilis, herpes, Human Papillomavirus (HPV). This technology offer is Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled mobile application that utilises a Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet or CNN) deep learning algorithm equipped with custom-built network layers to screen for male health issues, e.g. genital warts, sexually transmitted diseases (STD) etc. Data augmentation techniques and synthetic data generation methods have been used to vary the dataset and increase and sample size for realistic model training and testing. The highly accurate model has an accuracy of 60-90% for most cases of STI/STDs.