精东传媒

March 24, 2021

Funding win for UOW energy and cybersecurity projects

Industry collaborations to generate electricity from waste heat; improve data security for cloud computing

Two 精东传媒 of 精东传媒 (UOW) projects have been awarded funding under the Australian Research Council鈥檚 (ARC) Linkage Projects scheme, which supports collaboration between researchers, industry, governments, and community organisations.

UOW researchers will also collaborate on two other research projects funded under the scheme.

Federal Minister for Education and Youth Alan Tudge announced the successful projects today (Wednesday 24 March 2021).

In total, $29.5 million in funding was awarded to 65 new research projects aimed at promoting national and international research partnerships to find real-world solutions to a wide array of issues.

鈥淭hese projects will keep Australia at the forefront of important technological research, and they have the potential to create real-world advances in agriculture, renewable energy and space technology,鈥� Mr Tudge said.

One of the successful UOW projects, led by Distinguished Professor , Director of UOW鈥檚 Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM) and the node leader and theme leader of , will investigate ways to generate electricity from waste heat efficiently and make high performance cooling devices.

The other, led by Senior Professor , Head of UOW鈥檚 School of Computing and Information Technology, aims to develop innovative cryptographic technologies which realise efficient multi-key homomorphic encryptions (MKHE). This key technology functions to allow multiple users to supply their private input for collaboration in the cloud while keeping the user data confidential.

Distinguished Professor from ISEM will be a key contributor to a 精东传媒 of Queensland-led project to develop a lightweight, easy-to-operate magnesium diboride superconducting MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) magnet able to obtain high-resolution images at a low-cost.

Professor , from UOW鈥檚 Centre for Archaeological Science, will contribute his expertise to a Flinders 精东传媒-led project, undertaken in partnership with the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation, which aims to explore Aboriginal rock art and rock shelter occupation deposits in the Upper Murray River Gorge, South Australia.

Converting waste heat to electricity

Professor Wang and his team 鈥� Dr Zengji Yue and Dr David Cortie from ISEM and Dr Kirrily Rule from UOW鈥檚 School of Physics 鈥� were awarded $400,551 for their project to develop materials for harvesting heat into energy, which will position Australian academics and industries at the forefront of next generation of renewable power generation and refrigeration products.

This project was based on Professor Wang鈥檚 recent ground-breaking work on the , which has attracted extensive interest.

^{Distinguished Professor Xiaolin Wang, Director of UOW鈥檚 Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM) and the node leader and theme leader of ARC Center of Excellence in Future Low Energy Electronics Technologies, is researching technologies to convert waste heat into electricity.}

鈥淭he potential to create electricity from waste heat in Australia has not been tapped significantly due to the lack of suitable waste-heat-to-electricity conversion technology,鈥� Professor Wang said.

Thermoelectricity is one of the most promising technologies for waste heat conversion, but the biggest challenge has been to find a reliable, high performing and cost-effective thermoelectric material that can work at a broad range of temperatures.

This project鈥檚 successful implementation will provide the impetus for manufacturing, mining, renewable energy and other industries to adopt strategies for the sustainable adoption of clean energy-conversion technology.

鈥淚t is clear that the community and end-users stand to benefit greatly from the adoption of highly efficient energy-conversion technology, and one of the promising applications is the ultra-low temperature freezers for COVID19 vaccine storage鈥� Professor Wang said.

鈥淎t a broader level, the project will aid the national interest to meet future economic, social and climate requirements around emissions, worker safety and health while substantially improving the productivity and enabling reduced operational costs.鈥�

Partner organisations on the project are Azure Mining Technology, Natural Tech Imports, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.

Keeping user data confidential in the cloud

Professor Susilo and his team 鈥� Associate Professor Guomin Yang, Dr Dung Duong, Dr Fuchun Guo and Dr Jie Yang, all from the School of Computing and Information Technology 鈥� were awarded $331,898 for their project to develop encryption technology to allow multiple users to collaborate in the cloud while keeping their user data confidential.

^{Senior Professor Willy Susilo, Head of UOW鈥檚 School of Computing and Information Technology, has been awarded an ARC Linkage Grant to develop innovative cryptographic technologies.}

鈥淐heap cloud computing and cloud storage have fundamentally changed how businesses and individuals use and manage their data.鈥� Professor Susilo said.

鈥淭raditional encryption methods are extremely fast, and allow data to be stored conveniently in encrypted form. However, to perform even simple analytics on the encrypted data, either the cloud server needs access to the secret key, which leads to security concerns, or the owner of the data needs to download, decrypt, and operate on the data locally, which can be costly and create a logistic challenge.鈥�

Homomorphic encryption (HE) aims to solve this issue, but is restricted to a single user, which limits the collaboration of many organisations in joining their data for analysis while keeping their data confidential.

Multi-key HE (MKHE) promises a perfect solution, but is very challenging to realise.

鈥淭he aim of this project is solve this challenge,鈥� Professor Susilo said.

鈥淭his project aims to place Australia at the forefront of efforts to enable efficient MKHE - hence, enabling efficient cloud adoption for secure collaboration by industry in practice.

鈥淭his will provide direct economic benefits to Australian industry through the enablement of advanced technologies and low-cost business solutions which are developed in Australia.鈥�

Partner organisations on the project are Vivo Global Investment and Wubei Design International.