Professor Seokhwan Hwang and Ph.D. candidate Soojin Choi from the Department of Environmental Science & Engineering at POSTECH have won the Excellence Award at the 2022 Hyundai E&C Technology Competition. The awards ceremony took place on November 1 at the Hyundai E&C headquarters.

Professor Hwang’s research team won the prize for the category of future new business for proposing the development of a self-regulated artificial intelligence-based platform to enhance the stability of biogas plants.

Biogas technology is a green technology that transforms carbon sources of organic waste into methane and other high-value-added resources. However, processing them was unstable as prompt monitoring technology has not been developed and the conditions and properties of waste dramatically fluctuate.

To tackle these limitation, Professor Hwang and his team proposed an AI-based self-regulated platform that predicts the stability and signs of abnormalities of a plant by combining data of images along with the properties and conditions of entering substances to establish a regulating system accordingly. With this platform, it is expected that biogas production could be maximized to 670,000m3 per year by improving the efficiency of the process.

The research team plans to focus on building big data and developing a platform built on this technological concept.

Hyundai E&C has been hosting technology competitions to collaborate with businesses, universities, and research institutes with outstanding technological ideas in Korea and to advance construction technology for the future. A total of 16 teams were selected as the winner of the grand prize, excellence prize, participation prize and others across three categories, including cost-reducing technology, differentiating construction technology and new business for the future.