Engineering, manufacturing and construction

The latest research*eu RESULTS PACK– a collection of articles on EU-funded projects dedicated to a specific field of scientific research – is now available in free, accessible PDF. This brochure focuses on the drive to ensure maximum safety and security in all modes of transportation, specifically surface transportation (covering vehicles and vulnerable road users).

Reducing emissions and cutting operating costs – just two of the benefits waiting for the first long-range, 100% electrically powered passenger and vehicle ferries. An announcement in May brings the reality closer as the partner of an EU-funded project announces the market launch of a modular, lithium-ion battery system for ferries.

EU-funded RNA-based therapy targets the direct cause of some neurodegenerative diseases, not just their symptoms.

3D printing is potentially of great use to lunar exploration. Weight is a key constraint in space travel and the ability to create structures in situ, using lunar materials and solar power could bring lunar colonisation one step closer.

Around the world users were locked out of their computers as they fell prey to ransomware demanding they pay up or lose their data – 200 000 were hit on Friday 12 May 2017 alone.

Cloud computing, multimedia web applications and the Internet-of-Things are driving unprecedented global data traffic. The bandwidth requirements imposed by these applications are expected to double network traffic in data centres within five years, so work is being carried out by EU-supported projects to look at ways to ease the pressure.

The EU-funded RECAP project showcases affordable, scalable and flexible automatic media content analysis, enhancing media workflows as well as archive quality, thanks to its pioneering platform.

Imagine an online video whose content changes according to your gender, age and facial expression/emotions. This revolution is being made a reality by Italian SME Cynny with support from the MORPHCAST project.

e-Commerce retailers have been benefitting from insightful analytics for years, whilst their physical counterparts have mostly had to rely on instinct, hunches and trial and error. Sensor technology now allows for these physical retailers to benefit from advanced analytics too — and Irish startup Measurence intends to tap into this huge market potential.

60 minutes shaved off the time it takes to travel by air is an attractive proposition and one that an EU-funded project is now eagerly working on. PASSME has identified stress as the biggest bottleneck and is currently developing solutions to make airports more passenger-friendly, including new approaches to the processing of baggage.

By studying the interaction between touch stimuli and neural processing to improve robotic prosthetics, EU-funded projects such as NEBIAS and NANOBIOTOUCH, are also shedding light on how the whole brain functions.

A real cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger said. But quantum physics rewrites the rules, a fact now demonstrated by a team of researchers funded by the EU.

With competition for the use of forest resources ever increasing, the EU-funded project DIABOLO sets out to track disturbances and degradation more effectively.

Thinner, faster, stronger, more flexible – graphene has the potential to bring a new dimension to technologies in fields as varied as fashion, medicine and transport. EU funding is making sure Europe stays at the heart of the new developments.

With a patent already filed and the project barely halfway through, the EU funded CARBAZYMES has identified promising biocatalyst enzymes with the potential to transform industrial chemical processes, benefiting industry, consumers and the environment.

When creating structures capable of withstanding earthquakes, engineers currently rely on force-based methods only. They cannot decide how the structure will adapt to seismic vibrations, which can in turn lead to undesirable failures. An innovative design for a highly deformable reinforced concrete structure is hoped to bring such freedom, whilst optimising the use of resources, minimising costs and ensuring safety.

Whilst the extraction of shale gas in a safe and responsible way is an EU priority, an extraction method easing public concerns has yet to found. Hydraulic fracturing - commonly known as ‘fracking'' - not only fails to fit the bill, it is also known to trigger earthquakes. A UK-based company is putting forward a promising alternative in the EU-funded OCTOPUS TECHNOLOGY project.

Many EU-funded projects are working towards advancing robotics to assist people with overcoming societal challenges, such as providing care for the elderly or providing disaster relief. An academic who worked on one such project has now argued that author Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics are not the moral guidelines that they appear and should be updated.

A Polish/Czech research team has demonstrated how even a seemingly ultrasecure form of money, designed using quantum mechanics can have a potentially important security loophole putting it at risk of forgery. But this highlights not the shortcomings of this exciting new technology, but rather its continuing potential to transform human society in the 21st century.

Utility field work can be a real headache even with precise maps at hand. Admitting that they rapidly manage to locate the sought network, workers may end up damaging grids belonging to someone else. This type of scenario will soon be avoidable thanks to an assistive device developed under the LARA project.

MOTIT — an electric scooter renting service made available by means of a dedicated app — has come a long way since its launch in Barcelona in 2013. The system is will soon be available in Milan and is being tested in Paris. But this growth didn’t come without improvements. Complaints from users having difficulties in locating their scooters have led to the conception of a Galileo receiver and its integration into MOTIT scooters as part of the G MOTIT project.

Efficiently accessing a wider range of laser spectral regions is a must for the photonics industry. A miniature frequency tripler developed under the MINIMODS project promises to bring conversion efficiencies from 10 to above 30 %.

An innovative dry etching method developed by EU-funded researchers could reduce the cost of manufacturing solar cells by up to 25 %.

Fear of losing our jobs to those who can perform tasks faster, cheaper and perhaps with more creativity, has been longstanding. Equally, the introduction of a new leisure class with more free-time to spend once liberated from mundane, repetitive and boring tasks has also long been promised. With some forecasts indicating that within 20 years, 35 % of UK jobs are at risk from automation, it might be time to sort the job terminators out from the tumble dryers.

To this day, the true potential of the ‘all-connected’ world has been hindered by the very thing that is supposed to power it: battery technology. A material capable of turning sunlight, heat and movement into energy could soon shake things up.