Oil and gas industry invention wins innovation award

A technological development that has the potential to save Australia’s oil and gas industry millions of dollars each year has been crowned the overall winner at the 2019 Curtinnovation Awards.

Developed by Dr Tejas Bhatelia and a team of researchers at Curtin’s Western Australian School of Mines, Minerals, Energy and Chemical Engineering using the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and 3D printing, SpiroPak draws inspiration from nature in a design that is said to provide a more effective and energy-efficient separation of carbon dioxide from natural gas in LNG processing.

The Curtinnovation Awards recognise exceptional research outcomes that begin the process of translation into new products and services across Curtin’s Faculties of Science and Engineering, Health Sciences, Business and Law and Humanities, as well as Learning and Teaching.

Curtin University Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Professor Chris Moran congratulated the inspiring Curtin researchers whose innovations had been recognised at the annual awards ceremony.

“The Curtinnovation Awards aim to identify new technologies, products and services arising from the university’s world-class research and the standard of innovations being created continues to impress every year,” he said. “The overall winner of this year’s awards, SpiroPak, has the potential to save Australia’s globally competitive and strategically important oil and gas industry millions of dollars every year by creating significant efficiencies in LNG processing.”

Prof Moran said the other award winners demonstrated the university’s endeavour to transform research outcomes into successful new products and services.

“Other winning projects include a device that highlights energy consumption in the family home by using a simple light display to show the real-time status of a household’s energy balance, and a thermal battery that enables low-cost storage of energy at generation sites and across the electricity grid,” said Prof Moran.

“Further successful projects include an initiative that allows organisations to create strategies and action plans to enhance employee wellbeing, a processing technique that creates a new high-protein food ingredient for use in vegetarian and vegan food products, and a web app that semiautomates the screening of thousands of academic papers by academics and researchers, reducing screening time from hundreds of hours to just a few.”