UTS the only university represented in all categories of Pace Zenith Awards.
L-R: Professor Michael Blumenstein, Associate Dean (Research Strategy ＆ Management), Distinguished Professor Vigneswaran, and Dr Tien Vinh Nguyen.
Image: Prime Creative
UTS was the only university represented amongst nominees in all nine categories of the annual Pace Zenith Awards.
The arsenic elimination project developed by Distinguished Professor Vigneswaran and Dr Tien Vinh Nguyen of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was a finalist for the Water & Wastewater Control Award. For 14 years, the Awards, presented by PACE, Australia’s longest-established magazine for the process and controls sector, showcase Australian achievements in engineering.
The Waste & Wastewater Control Award seeks to highlight outstanding examples of water/wastewater management, treatment and processing. In a large field, the 2017 finalists were
- Luggage Point WWTP Project – Alliance Automation
- Vortab Elbow Flow Conditioner – AMS Instrumentation and Calibration
- Lower South Creek Program – Aqseptence Group
- 4D Processing Pump, Filter and Valve Systems – Columbus Group
- RAPTOR – CST Wastewater Solutions
- Malabar WWTP Project – 4Malabar
- Removing Pollutants from Ground Water – UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT
- Vegapuls WL S 61 – VEGA Australia
“We were very privileged to be in such company, both other nominees, judges and the range of Award sponsors who are using technology in such innovative ways,” said D/Professor Vigneswaran.
Judging was by an independent panel of industry experts who evaluated the projects on their successful implementation, their point of difference to other solutions and how any challenges have been overcome. The winner was RAPTOR (rapid transformation of Organic Residues) by CST Wastewater Solutions, a liquid-state anaerobic digestion process.
The FEIT project caught the judges’ attention for it’s low-cost, easy to operate solution to remove arsenic and deliver safe and clean drinking water in the Red river delta of Vietnam.
The UTS team is working with local Vietnamese partners on a local solution to a local problem in an area of about 20 million people. Partners include the Vietnam National University (VNU), Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) and local manufacturers.
They are deploying inexpensive technology to provide a model for clean water, which can be adopted worldwide to improve water quality for 130+ million people in the 70 + countries worldwide experiencing toxicity from naturally-occurring arsenic.
This project has previously been awarded a DFAT Google Against Poverty $500,000 prize from the partnership between the Australian Government’s innovationXchange and Google.org