RESEARCH CLUSTERS

Research Highlights

Bernal Institute secured €2.5m in European Research Council funding

In March 2020 Bernal Chair in Crystal Engineering Michael Zaworotko was awarded almost €2.5m in ERC Advanced Grant funding. University of Limerick received two awards of €2.5m each, these are the first ERC Advanced Grants to be hosted at the University. In total €450 million was awarded for long-term frontier research to 185 researchers by the ERC, the premiere European funding organisation, as part of the EU research and innovation programme Horizon 2020.

Professor Michael Zaworotko, Bernal Chair of Crystal Engineering and Science Foundation Ireland Research Professor at University of Limerick’s Bernal Institute, was awarded almost €2.5m for his project ‘SYNSORB – SYNergistic SORBents’. Professor Zaworotko, said his project “will address the high energy footprint of gas and vapour purification by single-step purification processes that involve the use of a new generation of solid materials called sorbents.

“These sorbents act like sponges for impurities by capturing them spontaneously and releasing them upon mild heating.

“The most important vapour is water vapour. Water vapour is everywhere in the atmosphere, even in the most arid regions, but harvesting pure water from water vapour using existing desiccants uses so much energy that it is not commercially viable despite the water stresses faced by much of humanity.

“Gases such as CO2 and acetylene are impurities in commodity production and must be removed using processes that typically involve chemical reactions. “These processes collectively use around 20% of global energy supplies and demand for water and industrial commodities continues to grow. Our goal is to discover and develop new sorbents that reduce the energy footprint of these processes by 50-90%, thereby significantly reducing the energy and, in turn, carbon footprint of these processes.”

ERC Advanced Grants support established, leading principal investigators that want longterm funding to pursue a ground-breaking, highrisk project. Advanced Grants may be awarded up to €2.5 million for a period of 5 years.

Bernal Chair in Crystal Engineering, Professor Michael Zaworotko

Advanced Drug Product Manufacturing Facility to be developed at Bernal Institute

SSPC, the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centre for Pharmaceuticals, hosted at the Bernal Institute, will soon have access to a suite expanding the research capabilities at UL through SFI Infrastructure Awards.

Bernal Chair in Pharmaceutical Powder Engineering, Professor Gavin Walker

Bernal Chair of Pharmaceutical Powder Engineering and Co-Director of SSPC, Professor Gavin Walker, will receive €1.9m to develop a national advanced drug product manufacturing facility to facilitate industrial collaboration and support SSPC research projects with industrial and academic partners. Professor Walker will lead the team helping to bridge the challenging engineering and scientific gap for process scale-up from lab to manufacturing.

“The move towards continuous manufacturing will be the next major innovation for the pharmaceutical industry and it’s essential that the Irish pharmaceutical manufacturing industry move towards continuous processing to remain globally competitive.” said Professor Walker.

“The implementation of continuous pharmaceutical processes is an opportunity to substantially reduce costs, reduce manufacturing times and bring medicines quickly to market, improve product defects, and encourage innovation by an integrated manufacturing approach.”

“This research infrastructure, will build on the University of Limerick’s reputation of internationally leading research in pharmaceutical manufacturing at the Bernal Institute.”

The new Advanced Drug Product Manufacturing Facility will deliver a suite of next generation process equipment to foster industrial collaboration on drug product manufacturing within the academic environment; an addition to SSPC’s significant capability in upstream continuous processing for active pharmaceutical ingredient production. ‘By making simple changes, we can have a positive impact on climate change’ Professor JJ Leahy

JJ Leahy, associate professor in UL’s Department of Chemical Sciences and a member of the Bernal Institute, is the energy and transport expert for the RTE TV Series ‘What Planet Are You On’, which focuses on getting households to take part in the fight against climate change by reducing their carbon footprint.

Professor Leahy has a strong background in circular bioeconomy and applied biofuels research; he is associated with MaREI – the SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine - and SFI’s Bioeconomy centre. This collaboration with industry and commitment to reducing our carbon footprint has led to two start-up biofuel companies as well as currently leading two EU projects on the Circular Bioeconomy, REFLOW and BIOWILL.

REFLOW involves academic and industrial organisations in seven countries, focusing on the recycling of phosphorous from the wastewater solids in dairy factories and using it as a CE marked fertilizer components.

The BIOWILL project aims to be a flagship for rural Ireland through a zero-waste biorefinery utilising all parts of willow trees to produce high to medium based biochemicals/materials and renewable energy in the form of biomethane production and natural fertilisers. BioWILL was awarded €909,057 from Interreg North-West Europe Programme, the project consists of 10 partners in four countries across Europe.

Professor JJ Leahy