The main area of research for Professor Foo is process integration, which is a holistic approach to process design, retrofit, and operation that emphasises the unity of the process. Professor Foo makes use of various process integration tools such as pinch analysis and mathematical optimisation to solve the following research problems:
Resource conservation – With the rising cost of fresh resources (e.g. crude oil, water, etc.) and increasingly stringent environment regulations, there is a need to maximise the efficiency of the use of resources, while minimising the generation of waste. Over the past decade, Professor Foo and his research team have developed various systematic design tools (pinch analysis, mathematical programming) for the synthesis of resource conservation networks (RCNs), addressing water minimisation, gas recovery and property integration problems. See the following for details:
Carbon-constrained energy planning – This is an area of research jointly established by Professor Foo and his close research partner Professor Raymond Tan (De La Salle University-Manila, Philippines), with the aim to combat climate change. Their pioneering paper in ENERGY (Tan & Foo, 2007) has received good attention in the research community since publication. The application of their works (“carbon pinch” in short) have been reported in various countries including New Zealand, China, Ireland, Korea, etc. In recent years, their research focus are dedicated for the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) for energy planning problem. See the following for deta