Research teams from Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School (SIGS) were recognized with a record-breaking ten awards at the 49th Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions 2024, including one "Prize of the City of Geneva," one "Outstanding Innovation Award," one “Gold Medal with Congratulations of Jury," three gold awards, three silver awards, and one bronze award.
Lin Lin’s team receives “Prize of the City of Geneva”
Associate Professor Lin Lin's team from the Institute of Environment and Ecology won the "Prize of the City of Geneva," one "Outstanding Innovation Award," one “Gold Medal with Congratulations of Jury," for the project “Novel Technology of Phosphorus Recovery from Municipal Wastewater Aiming at Iron Phosphate for Battery Use.” The novel technology involves the capture of phosphorus (P) resources from municipal wastewater to sludge and the highly efficient recovery of battery-grade iron phosphate (FePO4) via sludge fermentation and product refinery. The purity of the recovered FePO4 surpasses the industrial standard and the derived LiFePO4/C cathode demonstrates a higher discharge capacity compared to its commercially produced counterpart.
Lin Lin’s team exhibits their project at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions 2024
“External insulation monitoring and early warning system for power equipment” project award certificate and prize
Professor Wang Liming's team from the Institute for Ocean Engineering won a gold award for the project “External insulation monitoring and early warning system for power equipment.” This invention includes a pollution flashover pre-warning system for 10kV-1000kV AC and 1.5kV~1100kV DC power system. The measuring range on the online leakage current was 0.5 mA -5A and the flashover voltage at low humidity (75%<RH<99%) can be assessed with an error probability of less than 3%.
Wang Liming’s team’s project results
Jin Xin (second from right) and team pose with project results
Professor Jin Xin's team from the Institute of Data and Information won a gold award for the project “Ultra-Visibility Long-Range Scattering Imaging for UAV.” The team has developed an Ultra-Visibility Long-Range scattering imaging system (UVLR) that significantly surpasses the visibility of the human eye. The system overcomes the challenges of imaging under strong atmospheric scattering, enhancing visual clarity by four times at a kilometer-scale distance. This advancement provides unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with a clear view under extremely low visibility conditions, ensuring safe and efficient operation during takeoff, landing, inspection, and low-altitude delivery tasks. The system is deployable on various UAV models and is characterized by its cost-effectiveness, lightweight design, and adaptability. It holds significant potential for advancing UAV applications in low-altitude transportation, power inspection, and traffic monitoring.
Award certificate for the project led by Qu Juntian (left photo); Qu Juntian (right photo, first from right) participates in jury’s evaluation
Assistant Professor Qu Juntian’s team from the Institute for Ocean Engineering won a gold award for the project “A multi-modal rigid-flexible coupling intelligent grasping system for smart manipulation tasks.” The team has addressed the challenges of rigid and soft manipulators and has designed a rigid-flexible coupled manipulator with integrated grasping and suction functionality, which realizes multimodal precise grasping. The system is expected to be widely used as a universal platform in various scenarios such as ocean exploration, industrial production, human-computer interaction, etc. Particularly in the field of marine exploration, this technology can significantly improve the robot’s adaptability and operational flexibility to the deep-sea environment, enabling it to perform precise sampling, installation, or equipment maintenance tasks in the complex and variable unstructured environment of the seabed.
Feng Ping and Feng Feng’s team’s “Monitoring equipment for extremely sharp cutting tools" project results
The advanced manufacturing research group from the Institute of Data and Information led by Professor Feng Ping and Associate Professor Feng Feng in cooperation with industry partners won a silver award for the project “Monitoring equipment for extremely sharp cutting tools." The invented equipment can monitor tool sharpness that depends on a specific wear process, enabling characterization of cutting ability, coating thickness, and edge status via a contact cutting method.
Award certificate for Li Xinghui’s team’s project and project display
Associate Professor Li Xinghui’s team from the Institute of Data and Information won a silver award for the project “Single-Frame Complete Point Cloud Reconstruction against Strong Occlusion: Methodology, System and Demonstration.” Digital grating projection 3D measurement technology is widely used in advanced manufacturing because of its non-contact, high-precision, and high-stability features. Due to the propagation characteristics of light, it is still a great challenge to achieve a complete and rapid 3D reconstruction in strongly obscured scenes. To address this problem, the team’s project proposes a deep learning-driven fast dual-view complete 3D point cloud reconstruction system (DL_DPSL) based on the single-frame digital superimposed grating. It consists of two projectors, a camera, a moving chassis, a robotic arm, and a proposed multipath F2P (Fringe to absolute phase end-to-end prediction) convolutional neural network supervised by the physical model. The system realizes the fast dual-view 3D point clouds only from one superimposed digital grating and solves the inevitable shadow and occlusion problem in the strong occlusion scene.
Li Xinghui (first from right) and team pose for a group photo with jurors at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions 2024
Associate Professor Lin Lin's team from the Institute of Environment and Ecology won a silver award for the project “Long-life and Flexible Three-dimension Electrodes for High-rate Water Filtration and Purification.” This integrated water purification system innovatively adopts highly active and flexible electrodes with a three-dimensional porous structure, combining filtration, electrocatalytic, and electrosorption functions. It utilizes the confinement effect to enhance the efficiency of contaminants removal, and the electrodes are easily regenerable with a long service life. It meets various demands for domestic water purification and industrial wastewater treatment.
Edited by Alena Shish & Yuan Yang
Reviewed by Zhang Chengping & Chen Chaoqun
