Funding highlights

Dr Tadhg Kennedy, Molecular & Nano Materials Cluster

Dr Tadhg Kennedy’s TRIDENT project received

€3.65M under the government’s Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund to develop a sustainable smart battery system for residential energy storage. The goal of the TRIDENT project is to develop a low-cost, high-performance sodium-ion smart battery system for residential energy storage, using entirely sustainable materials and processes. The TRIDENT smart battery system will be a plugand-play solution that can be installed in a household utility room. It will empower the consumer to take an active role in the energy market, storing energy in times of low demand and selling back to the grid in times of high demand. The innovative solution will introduce flexibility to the energy markets, a key requirement for Ireland if the country is to meet its renewable energy targets. Partners on the project are Tyndall National Institute, Analog Devices, mSemicon, ICERGi Limited, Glantreo, TisaLabs and Smart M Power. Furthermore, the project has been fully endorsed by MIDAS, the Industry Association for Microelectronics and Electronic Systems Design in Ireland.

Professor Vivek Ranade’s FabPRO project was

awarded €1.2M funding under the SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme. Personalised products are gaining significant attention in personal care, food and medicine sectors. There is an urgent need to develop new ways to manufacture personalised products with desired properties on demand. The project aims to develop novel ways of producing liquid–liquid emulsions (used widely in upcoming personalised products) with desired attributes, using a compact and modular ‘factory in a box’ platform. The project will develop new insights, devices and computational models to realise such ‘factory in a box’ platforms. The project team will collaborate with Teagasc Food Research Centre, Ireland; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Helmholtz-Zentrum DresdenRossendorf, Germany. Unilever (a large multinational company) and Dolomite Microfluidics (a specialised company in the business of manufacturing equipment for making emulsions) are the team’s industry partners. The project will facilitate the realisation of truly distributed manufacturing of personalised products and will have a significant impact on manufacturing in Ireland and beyond.

Professor Vivek Ranade and MSCA fellow Dr Alison O’Connor, Process Engineering Cluster

Dr Anthony Comer, Composite Materials Cluster Dr George Barreto, Bio Materials Cluster

The H2020 FibreGY project was launched in January 2021 with the goal of making offshore renewal energy more competitive, sustainable and cost-effective, by enabling extensive use of fibre-reinforced composites. The project leverages the expertise of 12 research and industry partners across seven EU countries to qualify and develop innovative composite materials for offshore applications, including elaborate new design procedures and guidelines and inspection and monitoring methodologies. Ultimately, the technology will be demonstrated by building a real-scale floating wind turbine and a tidal turbine, by replacing most steel structural elements with lightweight, noncorrosive, fibre-reinforced composites. For this, FibreGY has conceived an extensive three-tier testing, validation and demonstration plan. This includes a comprehensive coupon-level and mid-scale experimental campaign, followed by the testing of large-scale prototypes and then building the realscale demonstrator. UL is the key partner involved in the scrutiny, selection and characterisation of composite materials. To achieve this, Dr Anthony

Comer’s FibreGY project was awarded a H2020 EU Nanotechnologies, Advanced Materials, Biotechnology and Advanced Manufacturing and

Processing (NMBP) grant of €667K to conduct an extensive experimental campaign involving static and dynamic mechanical testing of the composite materials. The outcome of the experiments will enable the design of structural elements that go into offshore renewable energy platforms. The realisation of the project opens doors to the installation of more costeffective offshore structures by curbing preventive maintenance costs, thereby making renewable energy more affordable to customers. Dr George Barreto was awarded €603K for his project, ‘Coupling Neurosciences and Artificial Intelligence to Potentiate Pharmacological Actions of Tibolone over Neuroglobin Signalling in Traumatic Brain Injury’, under the SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex disease and current treatments do not work well. Intriguingly, women have a speedier recovery from TBI than men. This is due to a protein/molecule called neuroglobin, which is more abundant in the female brain and has vast protective effects in brain cells. In collaboration with Dr Ramírez (Universidad de Concepción, Chile) and Dr Peláez (University of Salamanca, Spain), Dr Barreto’s group will develop an artificial intelligence pipeline for the design and screening of ligands to potentiate the pharmacological effects of tibolone on neuroglobin in male and female cell cultures. Current drug therapies used to treat TBI patients do not have a broad spectrum of action and the therapeutic effect often diminishes after injury. This is in addition to the fact that certain drugs work better in men than women. Developing a new drug costs millions and it can take at least 10 years to be released on the market. By proposing tibolone for re-purposing in TBI, it is intended to reduce this process. Previous studies by the Barreto group have shown tibolone to have great clinical potential and that it may be useful for TBI patients due to its broad anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Investigating new treatments such as this may prove crucial to patients who are the most in need, thereby reducing the burden to their loved ones, relatives and community, and ultimately reduce the burden of TBI on society.

Dr Ning Liu, Molecular & Nano Materials Cluster and

Dr Christophe Silien, Bio Materials Cluster Dr Christophe Silien was awarded €560K for his project, ‘Illumination Diversity for Label-Free Super-resolution Biological Multimodal Far-field Microscopy (ID-BioM)’, under the SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme. An important limitation of light microscopy is that nanoscale elements of cells driving life are too small to be observed and tracked, thus impeding discoveries in biological and medical research. ID-BioM aims to demonstrate a super-resolution to facilitate biological imaging at the nanoscale. Most diseases that challenge our society originate from perturbation of the natural life cycle of cells. Photonics technologies use light that can penetrate and probe the corresponding mechanisms dynamically. The same technologies are relatively inexpensive and applied to diagnose from extracted biopsy as well as endo-biopsy. This project will strengthen Ireland’s knowledge base in the photonics and medical device sectors, provide a platform for advanced biological research and enhanced knowledge on the cellular origin of diseases, and aid diagnostic and therapy monitoring. Professor Tewfik Soulimane and Professor Tofail Syed are also participating in this project. Researchers at the Bernal Institute and UL are working on an innovative solution to improve the recyclability of composite materials used in the construction, aerospace and automotive industries. These next-generation recyclable composites are being developed by the VIBES project, a panEuropean consortium of which UL is the only university partner. They could have a significant climate impact, while also creating new jobs in the sector. VIBES is funded by Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020. The project, which commenced in June 2021, seeks to improve the recyclability of composite materials through a greener, cost-efficient, non-toxic recycling technology. It is a research and innovation

project with a duration of 48 months and a budget

of almost €5.3M. Professor Maurice N Collins of the Bernal Institute is the project lead at UL. The work at UL specifically addresses the development of sustainable fibres for reinforcement of these next-generation recyclable composite materials, in addition to toxicity testing and the testing of the new composites for construction, aerospace and naval applications. VIBES builds on work done at UL that began with LIBRE, a project that aimed to free the composite industry of its reliance on oil-based precursor materials. The VIBES consortium comprises a host of partners across seven EU member states, plus research and technology organisations, companies, SMEs and public bodies. The consortium hosted a project review meeting at the Bernal Institute in May 2022, celebrating VIBES’ first-year anniversary. The progress and future activities of the project were presented and discussed during the meeting, which was organised in hybrid mode so that several consortium members could also participate online.

Dr Maurice Collins, Composite Materials Cluster