USTH and other institutes represented Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology to attend the international exhibition on Industry 4.0 – Industry 4.0 Summit 2018 – on July 13th, 2018 at JW, Marriott, Hanoi.
It is a sideline event of the high-level conference titeled “The vision and development strategy in the 4th industrial revolution”. It was hosted by the Government of the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam and the Central Economic Commission in collaboration with other governmental authorities during two days July 12-13, 2018.
The event was chaired by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and drew the participation of nearly 2000 representatives, 11 ambassadors and officials of international organisations as well as over 50 leading specialists in the region and in the world. Domestic and international enterprises also attended the event.
Representing USTH, the research team of Dr. Tran Dinh Phong, Dean of the Department of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, brought to event an artificial leaf version with 3% hydrogen efficiency and continuous operation time of 10 hours. The outstanding results of a series of studies on the artificial leaves of Dr. Phong and his partners promise a clean and cheap alternative to petrol, oil or coal for developing countries.
Over the past 10 years, facing the need to find alternative sources of fossil energy, scientists have come up with the idea of making artificial leaves that are capable of producing hydrogen, a clean fuel used in fuel cells, from sunlight and seawater through electrolysis of water. However, the best catalyst for the reduction of protons (H +) to hydrogen from water has been platinum which is a very rare and expensive material. Meanwhile, the amorphous molybdenum sulfide structure, a platinum-replacement catalyst, has remained a mystery. As a result, the design of new materials to replace platinum has faced many difficulties.
The research team of Dr. Phong has made significant contributions to successfully identify of the structure and mechanism of amorphous molybdenum sulphide, opening up hopes for the development of new catalysts for platinum.
This work has been published in Nature Materials, the world’s leading scientific journal, ranked 2/383 by SCIMAGO in Materials Science, 2/863 in Chemistry and 3/4363 in Engineering. In the mean times, it helped TS. Phong and his team won the main prize Ta Quang Buu 2018 by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam.
Besides USTH, VAST booth displayed products of other institutes such as Vietnam National Space Centre, Institute for Tropical Technology and Institute of Physics.
The displays at the expo are aimed at solving the current issues such as energy saving, sustainable development, or green industry. This is also an important part that the Industrial Revolution 4.0 targets to promot sustainable development, in addition to the application of modern technology, production and life to improve the quality of human’s life. Therefore, the event provided a golden opportunity for USTH and VAST to present the latest scientific and technological research results and to share and learne experiences from domestic and international experts and the prestigious organisations in the technology field.
