Overview

IChemE Student Chapter Festival 2024 is a national get-together event that involves engineering undergraduates from various public and private universities. The two-day event is organised by IChemE Universiti Malaya Student Chapter (IChemE-UM SC).

This event is supported by POPSIG, in conjunction with POPSIG Palm Oil Educational Outreach, which is in collaboration with Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC).

The theme of the Festival 2024 is “Propelling Greenovation: Sustainable Engineering for A Blue Planet". It will serve as a preparation stage to let the students complete and leverage their personal skills prior to stepping into the real world of chemical engineering. The theme of POPSIG Forum session is "Technological Advancement for Sustainable Palm Oil Industry".

Objectives

IChemE Student Chapter Festival

1. To foster a strong connection between engineering undergraduates from different universities.
2. To understand the processing and manufacturing industry.
3. To expose participants towards the tasks and responsibilities of a chemical engineer.
4. To be a platform of exchanging knowledge, ideas and experiences among participants.

POPSIG Forum

1. To understand the manufacturing process in palm oil industry.
2. To understand the contributions of palm oil industry to the UN SDGs.
3. To identify the ESG challenges, opportunities and contributions from the Malaysian palm oil industry.
4. To provide a platform to exchange views and suggestions between the students and the professionals.

Forum

Presentation 1: Fostering Agile Value Creations for Greener Manufacturing

Sime Darby Oils (SDO) is reputationally the largest sustainable palm oil producer in the world. Hence, SDO emphasises green manufacturing as a fundamental catalyst for carbon-neutrality endeavours and sustainable development with notable surge in high-impact initiatives and commitments. Besides adopting and implementing the low-hanging-fruits value creations (VCs) such as solar panel and inverters, SDO takes an extra mile with high impact and innovative VCs which significantly impacting on energy consumption, production processes and the overall equipment efficiency (OEE) of operations. The VCs are identified and structured through a deep dive understanding of the fundamentals, engineering validation and intensified business case analysis to ensure investment and tremendous team effort yield the expected outcomes and impacts towards SDO’s sustainable objective. This paper presents various VCs which SDO implemented successfully around the globe of operations and their impact on greener manufacturing. The VCs are applied on various areas of manufacturing operations with the application and adoption of basic and advance engineering practises including state-of-the-art of latest trending technologies such as IIoT and IR4.0 methodologies.

Presentation 2: Green Technology

The ultimate goal of process technology is to provide high quality products without compromising on environment sustainability. Process without usage of chemical contributes minimal effluents, zero oil losses and zero contaminants to environment. However, some process is not able to be operate without the help of chemical or without effluent generation. Therefore, improvisation on process design to minimise the carbon footprint is alternative to achieve sustainability technology. Types of equipment selection and additional heat recovery process during process design also help to reduce carbon footprint and contribute green environment. In a nut shell, it is always combination effort of process design and process selection to achieve sustainability technology and high quality production.

Speakers

Dr Nagendran Lelchumanan, Head, Product Excellence, Manufacturing Centre of Excellence, Sime Darby Oils/Sime Darby Plantation

Dr Nagendran, an Engineering Doctorate, is a highly skilled manufacturing professional with 18 years of experience in constructing, commissioning, operating and managing various scales of palm oil and palm kernel oil refinery and fractionation plants. Throughout his experience, Dr Nagendran contributed significantly to various high-impact deliverables of transforming and optimizing operations and process control, which resulted multi-million savings, volume uplifts and yield improvement, beyond the industry benchmarking. Dr Nagendran’s commitment to sustainability is evident through his expertise in green-energy, implementation of high-impact initiatives and his passion for adopting IR4.0 and IIoT. He is also a competent DOSH Steam Engineer and active member of the Malaysian Institute of Chemistry. He shares his motivation that: “We can’t describe passion, we can only live it”- Enzo Ferrari. And Dr Nagendran’s passion is being part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Low Su Li, Head of Process, Desmet Malaysia Sdn Bhd

Low Su Li is a Head of Process of Desmet Malaysia Sdn Bhd who has joined the company for nine years and counting. She received her degree in Bachelor of Process & Food Engineering with honours from University Putra Malaysia. Started off as an intern in the company and worked on fats modification for her final year project. The final year project completed was a pilot scale dry fractionation process of fatty acids. Su Li then joined the company after graduation and have actively involved in process design and commissioning of various processes in both Refining and Fats modification processes.

Moderator: Wail Gourich, Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Engineering, Monash University Malaysia

Wail Gourich received his BEng (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from Monash University Malaysia in 2021. He returned to Monash University Malaysia in the same year to pursue his PhD full-time and is currently in his final year. He is also a part of the Monash-Industry Plant Oils Research Laboratory (MIPO). His research interest lies in the sustainable processing of oils and fats, and he has published several research papers throughout his PhD candidature. Outside of his research, he also serves the university as a passionate and dedicated tutor in several Chemical Engineering units at the undergraduate level. Having gained valuable experience during his PhD candidature, he hopes to realize his dream of becoming a lecturer in the near future.

Closing remark

Koay Zhi Long, President, IChemE-UM Student Chapter 2023/2024

Zhi Long is the President of IChemE-UM SC Session 2023/2024, joining the club since his second year of study. Zhi Long was part of the committee team for the first IChemE-UM community outreach program "iVolunteer: Beach Clean Up", collaborating with the Malaysian Humanitarian Foundation (MHF). The event was to raise the awareness of beach cleanliness. Other than that, Zhi Long also actively participated in other events, such as being the Vice Director of the National Chemical Engineering Exposure Camp (NCEEC) 2023, which the event is to introduce Chemical Engineering professions to pre-university level students; being Assistant Head of the Event Management Department of ChemEng Evolution 2023 to celebrate IChemE's 100th Anniversary.

Acknowledgement

The organiser and POPSIG proudly acknowledge the support provided by Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) on the Palm Oil Educational Outreach. POPSIG has collaborated with MPOC on Palm Oil Educational Outreach programme since 2019. MPOC is a corporate body with a mission to promote the market expansion of Malaysian palm oil and its product by enhancing the image of palm oil and creating better acceptance through awareness of various technological and economic advantages (techno-economic advantages) and environmental sustainability.

POPSIG gratefully acknowledge the organisation and arrangement made by IChemE-UM SC.

Disclaimer: IChemE will not be storing or controlling any data linked to this event.