Deputy Head of School (Education) Dr Rajendran Parthiban presenting Vijendra Kumar Mohonee  with a certificate for winning the Mechanical category.

Alex Bastian and Ng Ting Jie are out to save the world – and the two Engineering students might just have found a way.

Road lighting consumes about three per cent of the total electricity consumption in the United States alone. To power this, fossil fuel burns high and will in turn cause global warming.

Alex and Ng put their heads together, and in the final year of their Bachelor of Engineering, developed the LED driver for highway lamps.

“The driver’s objective is to reduce energy consumption from street lights, save electricity cost and reduce the global warming effect,” Alex explained.

The “Energy-Saving Highway LED Lighting System” project, supervised by Dr Naing Win Oo, won first place in the Electrical and Computer System Engineering category in a competition organised by the School of Engineering.

Ng’s role was to build a smart communication system where street poles could communicate with each other using the existing electrical power line.

Joseph Leong and counterpart Kenneth Mapanga shared a creative idea that won them the Mechatronics category for a project supervised by Mr Veera Ragavan.

Automatic transport, he explained, is used mostly in controlled environments such as the factory floor, where the routes are relatively fixed and can be planned beforehand.

Tan Lling Lling won first place in the Chemical category. Here, she is receiving her certificate from Deputy Head of School  (Education) Dr Rajendran Parthiban.

Joseph Leong's work on automatic transport won him the Mechatronics category.

“But we thought it would be cool if these machines could rapidly organise themselves in new environments…and this would open up a heap of new applications for this technology,” Leong explained.

“Imagine a chain of self-directing trolleys, moving like ants across a disaster area to ferry critical supplies to where it's needed most. Or a fleet of robot waiters which can deliver food to tables on their own. Or even shopping carts which follow you around while you shop and automatically heads to the checkout counter when it's full,” he elaborated.

This, he added, was the vision that sparked the Intelligent Semi-Autonomous Transport (iSAT) project.

Chemical Engineering student Tan Lling Lling emerged winner of her category for research on

“metal-free-catalyst growth of carbon nanotubes”, a project supervised by Dr Chai Siang Piao.

She explained that to grow carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for application in medical fields would typically require elements such as iron and nickel. These, however, had drawbacks, thus her research explored alternatives.