Co-hosted by the CUNJC and Nanjing Overseas Collaborative Innovation Center (Cambridge, UK), the Roadshows of the CUNJC on International Technology (No.4) was held successfully on 26 May. 4 cutting-edge technology-based roadshow projects were shown both online and on-site in the event, attracting more than 10 mainstream investment institutions to participate.

The event introduced the following advanced technology projects from Oxbridge: Myriofoam – High Performance Cooling in Small Spaces, Mimicrete - Advanced Materials for the Future of Infrastructure, Yuyuan New Energy: Low Concentration Coal Bed Methane Power Generation Intelligent System, and UK OXSIGHT - Smart Bionic Glasses, covering fields of new materials, machine learning and computer vision, carbon neutralization, green building and sustainable development.

Enabling “Dual Carbon”Economy Development

Climate change and the greenhouse effect bring increasingly severe common challenges to human sustainable development. It is imperative to save energy, reduce emissions, and improve efficiency for the trend of global economic transformation towards low carbon and zero carbon is irreversible. To a certain extent, the essence of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality is a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial competition. 132 countries in the world have pledged to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by the middle of the 21st century, and the Chinese government has pledged to achieve carbon peaking by 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

The projects Yuyuan New Energy: Low Concentration Coal Bed Methane Power Generation Intelligent System (hereinafter referred to as Yuyuan New Energy) and Mimicrete - Advanced Materials for the Future of Infrastructure (hereinafter referred to as MimiCrete) proposed sustainable development plans from two dimensions of energy efficiency improvement and building consumption reduction.

Yuyuan New Energy is committed to providing a near-zero methane emission solution for the efficient use of ultra-low concentration coalbed methane. The founder, Professor Yu Ziyi, has been engaged in microreactor research at Cambridge University for 8 years. He is currently the chief youth scientist of the National Key Research and Development Program and a professor of the State Key Laboratory of Materials Chemical Engineering at Nanjing Tech University.

As the second-largest greenhouse gas in the world, methane produces 28 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. More than 47% of coal mining is ultra-low concentration gas with a concentration of less than 3%. In the fields of animal husbandry and organic composting, there are also pain points that methane is emptied and wasted in large quantities and pollutes the environment. Seizing the blue ocean market where ultra-low-concentration coalbed methane is difficult to utilize can not only realize the resource utilization of waste methane, but also bring considerable power generation revenue and carbon sequestration revenue to enterprises.

The project has developed the domestic leading methane adiabatic catalytic oxidation technology and intelligent cogeneration system, and has more than ten international and domestic patents. Compared with the traditional ultra-low concentration coalbed methane utilization technology, the adiabatic catalytic oxidation power coupling system developed by Yuyuan New Energy has the advantages of a wide range of gas source conditions, high resource utilization, high equipment safety, and good scalability. In terms of materials, processes and systems, it has core technologies of high-efficiency catalyst technology, micro-reactor process enhancement technology, and high-efficiency heat pipe intelligent heat exchange technology.

“The team's technology originates from the University of Cambridge and Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. Relying on the State Key Laboratory of Materials Chemical Engineering, and after decades of basic research and applied research, the project has completed the manufacture and pilot application of related prototypes, and some products have achieved industrial production,” said Professor Yu.

As the most commonly used infrastructure building material, the carbon emissions generated by concrete should not be underestimated, accounting for 4-8% of global carbon emissions every year. The data shows that in 2020, the use of concrete globally emitted 300 million tons of carbon dioxide, of which the maintenance and replacement consumption due to the properties of concrete being prone to cracking, aging and corrosion accounted for 35% of the above-mentioned total carbon emissions.

The project MimiCrete is dedicated to creating a sustainable and smart built environment using self-healing concrete restoration technology. The project has established a start-up company in Cambridge, UK, and carried out small-scale commercialization tests. The founder, Dr. Li Zijing, graduated from the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge. The core team is composed of PhDs and postdoctoral fellows of the Department of Engineering of Cambridge University, alumni of Cambridge Judge Business School and entrepreneurial mentors.

Originating from years of laboratory research and development, MimiCrete provides building materials with a smart self-healing system based on 3D printing and bionic design.

“It is like giving concrete a vein-like structure to deliver therapeutic drugs, helping concrete to ‘heal wounds' in the same way as the human body,” said Dr. Li. The system can find the location of cracks and release healing agents when cracks develop. No manual intervention is required in the repair process, and various indicators of the engineering system can be restored after healing, which can greatly extend the service life of infrastructure and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

Compared with traditional concrete structure protection technologies in the market, MimiCrete's technology has a series of application advantages such as low additional cost, low labor cost due to self-healing, repeated and continuous repair of cracks, unlimited crack size, and maintenance of mechanical strength after healing.

Improving the performance of ICT devices and promoting information technology innovation

The new wave of information technology has spawned new hardware requirements and endogenously driven new information acquisition and interaction methods. The project Myriofoam – “High Performance Cooling in Small spaces” (hereinafter referred to as Myriofoam) and UK OXSIGHT - Smart Bionic Glasses (hereinafter referred to as OXSIGHT) innovate from the perspective of improving device performance and developing new hardware to provide cutting-edge solutions.

Gamers often have the trouble that after playing mobile games for a long time, the freezing screen caused by the overheating of the mobile phone degrades the game experience and performance. With the exponential growth of CPU/GPU computing power and workload, and the rise of the metaverse concept, the heat dissipation problem of information and communication technology (ICT) products has become increasingly prominent, and it is urgent for ICT equipment manufacturers to improve the cooling performance of equipment.

Based on the dual-phase thermal component market, Myriofoam uses new flexible nanomaterials to minimize the transformation of existing manufacturing processes to improve the heat dissipation efficiency of consumer electronic products such as notebook computers and smartphones, 5G servers, and on-board GPU drive systems for electric vehicles.

The project was incubated by Cambridge University IfM, UK, and a start-up company was established. The patented nanomaterial developed is named “Myriofoam”, which can be plated on the industry standard cooling device “vapor chamber” as a "wick". It effectively provides a huge heat dissipation surface area in a small space, so that the cooling performance of the vapor chamber can be improved by up to 4 times, compared to traditional sintered copper wicks. At the same time, thin and light nanomaterials can also make the device more lightweight, reducing costs and allowing a better user experience.

“The global heat management market size is expected to reach $16 billion in 2023”, said Charles Jarvis, the CEO of Myriofoam. There is a huge demand for improved cooling performance from a range of manufacturers. Charles Jarvis has more than 30 years of experience in high-tech companies such as computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), computer integrated manufacturing, high-performance computing (HPC), "in memory" data networks, and so on ... The Myriofoam team has several engineering experts and scientific consultants from Cambridge University who have years of research and industrialization experience in materials and electronic device development.

Humans rely on vision to obtain 80% of information. Another hard-core roadshow project, OXSIGHT, focuses on the deep learning algorithm based on mobile technology, aiming at the segmented visual impairment market.

OXSIGHT is led by Professor Philip Torr of Oxford University, winner of the world's highest award in the field of computer vision “Marr Award” and the the first “Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) World-Leading Researcher Fellows” in 2021. The project has entered the stage of corporate operation, focusing on creating artificial intelligence vision technology platform to develop wearable and portable artificial intelligence vision devices,and extending the technology to other fields. In response to the needs of people with vision loss (such as central vision loss,peripheral vision loss and general vision loss), OXSIGHT's technology can help users capture, calculate, process data, and use fully understood relevant information to provide users with artificial intelligence vision solutions.

Different from traditional AR and VR products, the smart bionic glasses product developed by this project is the first in the world. While integrating machine learning and deep learning, it includes the relevant research results of the brain's interpretation of visual information in neuroscience, and realizes a balance between wearability, functionality and usability.

“OXSIGHT is not just a simple hardware equipment manufacturer, but also a technology-driven company,” said Chen Xuesong, CEO of OXSIGHT China. “With the maturity of voice and image recognition technology, big data and AI technology, and 5G deployment, OXSIGHT's artificial intelligence vision technology can also be extended to fire safety, medical image reconstruction, vehicle navigation assistance and other fields that require machine vision, and eventually transited to consumer-level artificial intelligence vision products. In future, smart bionic glasses with artificial intelligence vision technology may have the opportunity to replace mobile phones and become the next generation of smart hardware, completely freeing people's hands.”

Focusing on the initial research fields of information technology and renewable energy, biomedicine and health care, smart city and environmental protection, zero carbon and sustainable development, the CUNJC will, as always, build an effective platform for the advanced scientific research and technological achievements of Cambridge University and its innovation ecosystem through regular roadshows, as well as an effective platform to connect with the needs of domestic innovation and entrepreneurship industries and innovation capital, and actively promote the landing of high-quality innovation projects and the market-based application of advanced scientific research results.