Research Newsletter - Issue 90: Good News

 EU Horizon Europe Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry and Space) Awards 

Congratulations to all DCU Principal Investigators (PIs), academic collaborators and research team members who have been successful in securing EU Horizon Europe Cluster 4 funding as a partner:

Edu4Standards.EU - Education for Standardisation in the EU 

DCU Lead PI: Dr Harshvardhan Pandit (School of Computing/DCU ADAPT)

Edu4Standards.eu addresses the current lack of EU’s standardisation experts and the underdevelopment of standardisation education by specifying standardisation skills needed in the EU, analysing the fragmented teaching landscape and its gaps, and developing an Innovative Teaching Concept on Standardardisation (ITCoS) suitable for various study contexts and specifically considering digital, green, and social aspects. 

DILAPRO - DIgital LAser PROduction: Digital Twins of Laser Processing for Multi-Capability Manufacturing of Complex Components and Certification 

DCU Lead PI: Professor Dermot Brabazon (School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering/I-Form Research Centre)

Making Europe the first digitally-led circular, climate-neutral and sustainable economy needs major changes across manufacturing: efficiencies in energy and material consumption, new solutions to problems in certification and standardisation, and upskilling of the European workforce. DILAPRO contributes to all of these, driving decarbonisation and the twin Green and Digital Transitions via two ground-breaking software tools for laser-based production of complex products: DILAFACT (Digital Laser Factory) and DILACERT (Digital Laser Certification). 

COMPAS - CO INTEGRATION OF MICROELECTRONICS AND PHOTONICS FOR AIR AND WATER SENSORS 

DCU Lead PI: Professor Fiona Regan (School of Chemical Sciences/DCU Water Institute)

The main objective of COMPAS is to develop a compact, inexpensive and ultrasensitive PIC sensing platform (PSP) for air and water monitoring, relying on the co-integration of light source, detectors and electronic IC for on-chip signal processing. The PIC sensor principle will be based on interference between two guided light modes, one of which interacts with analytes and the other being a reference. COMPAS will build a first-of-a-kind fully integrated system around this principle (including light source, detectors and signal processing). 

TOXBOX - Toxicology-testing platform integrating immunocompetent in vitro/ex vivo modules with real-time sensing and machine learning based in silico models for life cycle assessment and SSbD

DCU Lead PI: Dr Harry Esmonde (School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Safe and Sustainable by Design approach requires an entire life cycle monitoring of toxicity of chemicals. However, current testing systems cannot mimic the exposure conditions related to each step and are not compatible with downstream in silico analyses. New sets of instrumentation that enable modular testing capacities with integrated data bridging and progressive in silico model development systems are needed. TOXBOX will provide a device based on a prototype developed in a H2020 project, PANBioRA, with a flexible microfluidic and instrument architecture to provide a plug and play testing platform to ease accessibility and interlaboratory validation.

European Innovation Council (EIC) Transition Award 

Congratulations to Professor Liam Barry (School of Electronic Engineering) who has been successful in securing the EIC Transition award for the M-ENGINE project. DCU will coordinate this project. 

M-ENGINE proposes a unique solution to the rapidly increasing bandwidth demands of data centers. With the massive growth of AI and social media in an increasingly connected world, data centers are expected to account for 20% of Europe's energy use by 2030, posing a significant challenge to meet the EU's climate goals. Current solutions to increase bandwidth in optical communications involve adding more single-channel lasers, which neither meets the capacity needs nor the energy requirements. M-ENGINE offers a scalable solution based on the Nobel prize-winning technology of optical frequency combs to provide highly coherent multi-channel lasers for high-capacity, low energy consumption data transmission. The result will be a scalable photonic chip engine meeting future data needs with reliability, long-term operation, and a clear business case. M-ENGINE's primary market focus will be data centers, but it will have the flexibility to address related markets, such as photonic computing.