EIT Manufacturing

Funder: European Institute of Innovation and Technology

I-Form Investigator: Denis Dowling, UCD

EIT Manufacturing is a consortium of 50 partners across 17 countries and links industry, research technological organisations and universities across Europe. Its vision is that global manufacturing innovation is led by Europe. EIT Manufacturing’s mission is to “bring European manufacturing actors together in innovation ecosystems that add unique value to European products, processes, services – and inspire the creation of globally competitive and sustainable manufacturing”.

I-Form, via UCD, is involved in a number of projects in the areas of Education and Innovation, two of the three pillars of EIT Manufacturing’s strategy. Co-funded projects include:

STRADA          

STRADA’s objective was to empower women in manufacturing through a tailored leadership programme, including training courses, one-to-one mentoring sessions with leaders in the manufacturing space and various networking opportunities including webinars, workshops and becoming a member of the alumni community. It is designed to support women living in the EU or associated countries, at different stages of their manufacturing careers, whether working in academia - researchers, lecturers, MSc and PhD students or industry.

EPSILON

EPSILON developed a data-driven solution that predicts manufacturing energy consumption rate and renewable energy yield with high accuracy to support organizations in orchestrating production schedules, via balancing grid vs locally produced energy, insights at the asset level into the drivers of energy efficiency, CO2 emission reporting, etc. 

North West Centre for Advanced Manufacturing 2

I-Form Investigator: David Tormey, ATU

I-Form's partner institutions Atlantic Technological University and Trinity College Dublin City have partnered with Catalyst, Irish Manufacturing Research, North West Regional College and Ulster University to launch this joint programme. The initiative will result in 20 SMEs implementing innovative manufacturing solutions that deliver measurable improvements in sustainability and competitiveness.

NWCAM2 will address crucial challenges in the life and health sciences sector by supporting SMEs in the development of environmentally sustainable manufacturing processes and products – enabling them to innovate, reduce emissions and compete on a global scale. 

NWCAM2 builds on the success of the original NWCAM project, funded through INTERREG VA, which was widely recognised for delivering high-impact manufacturing innovations

The Northwest Centre for Advanced Manufacturing (NWCAM) / INTERREG VA Programme

I-Form Investigator: David Tormey, IT Sligo

The Northwest Centre for Advanced Manufacturing (NWCAM) is funded (€8.7m) by SEUPB Interreg VA with IT Sligo's PEM Research Centre receiving approximately €1m in research funding. The primary objective of the programme is to underpin academic collaboration across the Interreg VA regions with a focus on supporting enterprise R&D requirements within the respective regions. There are 4 thematic areas for the project, Additive Manufacturing, Sustainable Manufacturing, Advanced Polymer products and Nano-Manufacturing.

IMDEA Materials Institute and Los Alamos Labs Collaboration

I-Form Investigators: Sean Lean and Mingming Tong, NUIG

I-Form has entered into a collaboration with the IMDEA Materials Institute in Madrid, Spain to conduct research in the area of metallic microstructure evolution modelling. The team at IMDEA is led by Prof. Javier Llorca and collaborators include Dr Damien Tourret and Dr Javier Segurado. The project involves a post-doctoral researcher from NUIG spending equal amounts of time between Spain and Ireland, under the supervision of Dr Mingming Tong and Prof Seán Leen at NUIG. A further complementary partnership has been established in this area between NUIG and Dr Ricardo A. Lebensohn, Team Leader, Materials Science and Technology Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA.

Innovation Eco-system to Accelerate the Industrial Uptake of Advanced Surface Nano-Technologies (NEWSKIN)

I-Form Investigators: David Kinahan and Dermot Brabazon, DCU

Key Enabling Technologies (KET´s) deployment will be the driving force for a significant part of the goods and services that will be available in the market in the next decade. Amongst KET´s, nano-enabled surfaces and membranes must be highlighted due to their huge potential to offer material solutions to address Sustainable Development Goals resulting in positive and sound impacts for the society and key industrial sectors. The NewSkin project aims to create an Open Innovation Test Bed (OITB), a new legal entity which will provide the European Innovation Ecosystem with the necessary technologies, resources and services to uptake a set of game changing, efficient and cost- effective innovative processes to manufacture nano-enabled industrial and consumer products as well as the necessary testing capabilities to demonstrate nano-enhanced goods features.

Seamless and Safe Human-centred Robotic Applications for Novel Collaborative Workplaces (SHERLOCK)

I-Form Investigator: Nikos Papakostas, UCD

The SHERLOCK project introduces the latest safe robotic technologies including high payload collaborative arms, exoskeletons and mobile manipulators in diverse production environments. The modules are enhanced with smart mechatronics and AI-based cognition, conceiving efficient Human-Robot Collaboration stations that are designed to be safe and guarantee the acceptance and wellbeing of operators. In future industrial environment, robots and workers would be able to function as co-workers to bridge the performance gap through the adoption of smart systems and sensors.

Center to Center (C2C) International Collaboration on Advanced Photovoltaics: Electrode Manufacturing and Indoor Power Applications

I-Form Investigator: Dermot Brabazon, DCU

The aim of this collaboration is transformative research on advanced photovoltaic (PV) technology that greatly extends the state of the art in three major areas: 1) advanced manufacturing processes, 2) mate-rials for high performance, low cost silicon and tandem PV technology, and 3) new markets for PV in powering the internet of things (IoT) from indoor light sources.