The 5th Workshop of HK PolyU‐HIT Joint Research Centre for Sustainable Urban Water Environment (香港理工大學－哈爾濱工業大學可持續城市水環境聯合研究中心) was held in Yixing, a city in Jiangsu Province, on 18th November 2017, at which six researchers from HIT (冯玉杰教授, 李一凡教授, 邢德峰教授, 刘冰峰教授, 李建政教授 and 刘绍琴教授), and six researchers from PolyU (Prof. Xiang-dong Li, Prof. Guo-hua Chen, Dr. Henry Po-Heng Lee, Dr. Ben Shao-yuan Leu, Dr. Yi Qian, and Dr. Wei-zi Cai) presented their recent research achievements in water pollution, wastewater treatment, energy production, resource recovery, and environmental nanotechnology. After the technical sessions, a working meeting of the Management Committee of the centre was held in the late afternoon to summarize the achievements of the centre during the last 5years. Further collaboration between PolyU and HIT in this area as well as the development of the centre was also discussed.
The main achievements of the centre were summarized as follows.
- Six collaborative interdisciplinary research projects were jointly initiated and equally funded by both the State Key Lab of HIT and the RISUD of PolyU
- Ten joint publications in renowned SCI journals
- Strengthened exchanges among researchers associated with the centre
- Joint-supervision of 4 PhD students
- Five joint workshops conducted in Hong Kong or in the mainland
The members of the centre fully agreed that the past collaborations have assisted both PolyU and HIT to effectively increase their research capability and allowed them to explore new topics of multi-disciplinary research.
As the existing agreement will expire soon, both sides agreed that the existing collaboration should be continued and expressed the wish to sign a new agreement to extend operation of the joint centre for another 5 years, with the following three focuses: (1) Development of innovative wastewater treatment technologies to achieve synergy of water reuse, energy generation, and resource recovery; (2) A smart urban water system with the aid of geo-spatial information technologies for pollution monitoring and simulation at a large scale; and (3) Heterogeneous transmission of environmental pollutants from the air phase, or the land/soil phase into the water phase through the interface.
Members of the joint centre also had a discussion on a new strategic policy recently released by the Central Government of China which encourages the establishment of new joint state key laboratories in Hong Kong or Macao. As the state key laboratory of HIT and PolyU have had a long history of successful collaboration in sustainable urban water environment, both sides agreed to prepare for the submission of a joint application for establishing this new type of state key laboratory in the near future once the scheme is launched.
