Here you can find short articles describing the impact and successes of some of our funded projects.
Impact stories from KDT JU projects will appear here. Stories from ECSEL JU projects continue below.
ECSEL JU projects
POSITION II
ECSEL JU project POSITION II has just finished its 3 year run with impressive results - the project's results significantly enhance the competitiveness of Europe in the rapidly emerging field of minimal invasive surgery. The achievements of this Netherlands-led consortium will enable the further development of the European R&D and manufacturing capability in an extremely innovative industrial segment with a high economic importance, not only encompassing the micro-fabricated device itself, but also the various value chains that they enable. Finally, by bringing smart catheters into the domain of high volume manufacturing, POSITION II improves the quality of health-care at manageable cost.
Productive 4.0 / Arrowhead
Partner in the ECSEL JU funded project “Productive4.0” Bosch has produced a neat video that explains how the project results are really helping them to optimise their business processes to match rapid changes in their supply networks.
Productive4.0 has also set up a video channel, containing many interesting videos about their work and related projects such as “Arrowhead”.
Health.E - InforMed - Position-II
The consortium around the projects InforMed and Position-II, who are also leading projects in the Health.E Lighthouse Initiative, have published a delightful and enlightening article in the publication "EU Research". It is available for download here, with thanks to the project coordinator Ronald Dekker for permission.
I-MECH
ECSEL JU project I-MECH has released a new descriptive video. You can view it here.
See also www.i-mech.eu for more information!
CRYSTAL
An EU-funded project has established a European standard that promotes the sharing of data across partners, stakeholders and customers - safeguarding the region's status as a global leader in safety-critical systems used for the aerospace, automotive, healthcare and rail sectors. Read a full story here!
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Calibrating a combustion engine to adhere to all the necessary performance and environmental standards can involve monitoring and managing up to 50 000 variables. Changing just one can impact the rest, demanding a whole new set of calculations and models. When creating complex engineering systems, one of the biggest challenges is managing the sharing of information across partners. Data can remain in silos as partners are unable – or unwilling – to make their data available outside organisations, resulting in systems that are slow to change and adapt. The EU, participating states and industry-funded CRYSTAL project created a specific European Interoperability Standard (IOS) – an open specification that enables the seamless transfer of data among partners – to accelerate innovation. Read a full story here! |
InForMed
A project selected as a success story by the European Commission - DG RTD. An abstract is given below. See their full article here!
A new approach to medical device innovation
The EU, Participating States and industry-funded project has developed a new platform approach to the innovation chain for next-generation medical devices, giving a boost to European manufacturers, in particular SMEs. The project has established a facility that companies can use to manufacture and test prototype micro medical devices, ensuring European leadership in this vital technology-based sector.
INFORMED offers microelectronic and micro-mechanical assembly facilities at Philips Innovation Services in Eindhoven, the Netherlands along with all the medical certification needed to pass into medical trials. Any company with a great idea but no in-house resources can draw on all the expertise of the platform on a normal commercial basis.
Find out more here.
Semi40
After a successful project review, Semi40, which addresses the digitizing of the semiconductor manufacturing, made a presentation of the first results through an info letter.
http://www.semi40.eu/news/newsletter.html
MANTIS
Today’s technology means that maintaining equipment often involves analysis of a large amount of data. Keeping an eye on every element of a machine, knowing when something has gone wrong and what the root cause is becomes increasingly difficult as machines become more complex.
Now, the EU, ECSEL Participating States and industry-funded MANTIS project is working to provide companies with everything they need to keep track of their machines and keep them running – from the sensors to the data analysis – using artificial intelligence. The team is developing what it calls its own maintenance service platform.
The project will help businesses save time and money by enabling them to anticipate large problems before they occur or even to change the working conditions of assets, allowing maintenance tasks to be scheduled at an appropriate time for the business.
“We are now working on getting feedback from experts and stakeholders in order to make the last iteration [of the platform] before publishing it,” says project coordinator Urko Zurutuza of Mondragon University in Spain.
Read more here.
EMC2
Today’s world is full of complex mechanical devices, most of which contain several internal electronic controllers doing different jobs. These are known as embedded systems.
For example, a modern car may have 100 different such systems controlling everything from the airbags to the windows and on-board entertainment. Aircraft also have many different computers, each with a particular role. Similarly, equipment ranging from industrial manufacturing machines to medical scanners has multiple embedded processors.
Having many embedded systems is expensive and inefficient, as each one must be designed and built separately and requires a power source. These systems all need to ‘talk’ to each other to ensure each device functions correctly. And since some may be more important for safety and security than others they must be prioritised. As a result, the growing need for embedded systems is a major bottleneck in the development of more efficient, cheaper, sustainable devices – something the EU-funded EMC2 project aimed to address.
“Many of the innovations in today's devices are based on many small embedded systems doing a particular, isolated job,” says Frank Oppenheimer of German project partner OFFIS who was a member of the EMC2 management team. “If you want more and more functions in your device you can’t just keep adding hundreds more embedded systems. So the trend is to integrate different functions into a single hardware platform.”
Read more here.
ARROWHEAD
ARROWHEAD software is already being used in several products and projects around Europe.
In some cities across Scandinavia, including Stockholm and Gothenburg, ARROWHEAD software is helping energy utilities cut their primary power consumption by improving communication with digital heating systems. The technology allows the utilities to have better control over consumption at peak times – early morning and early evening – which means that they do not have to switch to more expensive fossil fuels to meet the spikes in demand. This also cuts costs passed on to the consumer and limits the use of fossil fuels, benefitting the environment.
In another project, also in place in Scandinavian cities, waste-sorting companies are integrating ARROWHEAD technology in their container parks and garbage trucks, allowing them to ‘talk’ to each other. The system can help reduce the distance trucks drive – and the amount of fuel they consume – by communicating in advance which containers are full and which still have space.
ARROWHEAD software is also being used in Finland, Hungary and Italy to help electric vehicles communicate with charging stations. With the software, vehicles automatically know where they can recharge their batteries. Meanwhile, an Italian airport has also installed ARROWHEAD technology to help improve airport logistics.
“We have experienced a very strong interest in our software. Today, other EU projects are using our technology and building it into new systems,” says Delsing.” Meanwhile, big companies and projects – including smart cities projects – are keen to know what ARROWHEAD technology can do for them.”
Read more here.