Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-informations-sur-les-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Novel microwave-assisted vacuum drying for heat sensitive foods (MILD-DRY)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Spain,Türkiye,United Kingdom,France,United Kingdom,Ireland,Austria,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-09-01
End date: 2014-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1495896.0
EU funding (EUR): 1149984.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

Heat sensitive foods and products that possess excellent quality in terms of taste, aroma, texture, and appearance, such as herbs, spices, seafood, etc., pose a major challenge to food driers. Products such as garlic, ginger, spring onions and shrimps are cellular tissues containing gas-filled pores that tend to collapse when subjected to dehydration. This collapse is more noticeable with prolonged exposure to elevated drying temperatures, such as those used in convective drying. For this reason, hot air drying results in substantial degradation in quality attributes such as colour, nutrients and flavour, sever shrinkage also reduces bulk density and dehydration capacity. Also, chemical changes causing loss of flavour and nutrients occur during convective drying so the properties of dehydrated products are poor. A number of drying techniques have been developed over the years, among them atmospheric forced-air dehydration, a very common method. The major disadvantage of the hot air convective drying of food is the low energy efficiency and lengthy drying time during the falling rate period. MILD-DRY will build on the positive results of laboratory trails using microwave-assisted vacuum drying (MAVD) for the successful dehydration of selected foods, whereby the drying time for carrots for example was reduced to 2 h compared with 4.5-8.5 h in convectional hot air drying. Moreover, dried carrots showed higher rehydration potential, higher beta-carotene and vitamin C contents, lower density, and softer texture than those prepared by air drying. Further research effort will be performed in order to optimise the approach through the intermittent as opposed to continuous application of MW in order to achieve higher energy savings and product quality enhancement. To bridge the gap between laboratory research and industrial application, a prototype system will be developed for its validation in commercial food drying facilities.

Keywords: microwave-assisted vacuum drying process,improve microwave system for industrial drying,model of heat and moisture transfer,sensorial and quality properties of dried foods.
DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW STEERABLE PARACHUTE SYSTEM FOR RESCUE OF SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZE AIRPLANES (PARAPLANE)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Spain,Germany,Netherlands,Spain,Netherlands,Switzerland,Germany
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-12-01
End date: 2015-05-31
Duration (months): 30.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1499490.0
EU funding (EUR): 1130000.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

The aim of the project is to design, produce and validate a demonstrator of a Steerable Aircraft Parachute System for rescue of small and medium size airplanes, such as Light Sport Aircrafts (LSA), weighting up to 500 kg, as well as for space capsules, and navigated within the frame of the Global Navigation Satellite System GNSS (e.g. GPS/EGNOS/Galileo). Once the emergency system is activated by the pilot, the rescue system will deploy a rectangular parachute which will be automatically steered to a safe landing zone by means of an Autonomous Guiding Unit (AGU). The main purpose of the rescue parachute system is therefore to slow the aircraft to a reasonable descent speed leading to a safe and survivable landing and touchdown. The consortium includes: an SME company from Spain (CIMSA, Project Coordinator) specialized in the development, industrialization and marketing of parachute systems; an SME from the Netherlands Satellite Services BV - SSBV), specialized in avionics and communication services; an SME from Switzerland (Airlight) specialized in the development and manufacturing of fabrics for lightweight structures; an SME from Spain (Zero2Infinity) dedicated to touristic and scientific high-altitude flights; an SME from Spain (QUANTECH) focused on the development and commercialization of simulation software. Finally, an industrial company from Germany (Flight Design), which specializes in the design and production of small and medium size aircrafts has been also included in the consortium as end-user. Flight Design will become an SME in 2013 corresponding to period 2 of the project. SME partners expect to increase their annual turnover (between 10-12%) by using the PARAPLANE system and other outcomes of the project. The partnership includes three RTD performers from Spain, Germany and Netherlands with unique experience in the development of computational techniques for aeroelastic analysis of parachutes (CIMNE), control and guidance systems (NLR) and real-time data acquisition systems (DLR).

Keywords: numerical simulation,flight tests,safety parachute,light sport aircraft,space capsules,emergency,procedures,guidance,navigation and control systems,landing database,steerable parachute.
High Power Transmission Line Cable Inspection (CHAPLIN)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Spain,United Kingdom,Spain,Bulgaria,Portugal,Greece
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-12-01
End date: 2014-11-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1181714.4
EU funding (EUR): 924000.0
Participants: 7
Project status: CLOSED

There are many thousands of miles of high power line transmission cables dispersed around Europe. Some are installed in remote areas where it’s difficult to serve. Furthermore, line cables operate in severe conditions. The cables are subject to many environmental and operation factors such as moisture, voltage stress, omitting jacking and structural imperfections. These factors are the main reasons for inducing defect within the cable structure. A common type of defect that has been identified as water trees, which are the resultant of elevated voltage stress combined with the moisture ingress into the cable structure. Hence, there is a need for Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) inspection technique that can detect common types of defects. The most widely used NDT techniques to detect defects in cables are visual inspection and helicopter missions. Visual inspection done by experienced teams of personal on foot, this usually takes a lot of time and effort and in some situations it is impossible to conduct due to the lack of accessibility. The helicopter missions can be used in such situation; however, it’s a very costly, tedious and difficult task, especially for the pilot since the helicopter needs to fly at minimum distance to the power lines. The possibility of strong side winds additionally turns this task into a dangerous situation. It is proposed to use Long Range Ultrasonic Testing (LRUT) as an NDT technique. LRUT can be used to inspect for defects/corrosion for many metres (up to 300m) from limited points of access. This technique will be used to identify the presence and the location of the defect (including areas where accessibility is an issue). This development will have a significant positive impact on the power industry as it enables just-in-time maintenance, reduction in the operation and maintenance costs, improving safety by reducing or eliminating helicopter line inspection and improve the quality of visual inspection practices commonly used today.

Keywords: cable structure,defects,ndt inspection,long range ultrasonics
Advanced Design and Industrialization of Organic Sensitizers without Ruthenium for Dye Sensitised Solar cells (ADIOS-RU)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Ireland,Switzerland,France,France,Spain
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-11-01
End date: 2014-10-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1118520.4
EU funding (EUR): 865000.0
Participants: 5
Project status: CLOSED

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) are a promising new generation of photovoltaic which have relatively high performance compared to silicon-based solar cells in many non-ideal light environments such as dim, diffuse and indoor light. They are on the verge of wide-scale commercialization but still face challenging issues to solve on long-term stability, materials cost and ability to recycle. Many of these issues are rooted in the liquid phase of the cell, the dye / electrolyte pairing. In particular, the reliance on the rare earth Ruthenium as the active constituent of the dye has strong implications on the raw material cost and could potentially be difficult to source in the long term. The ADIOS-Ru project aims to develop a suite of materials for highly stable, low cost DSSC with immediate commercialisation potential. Organic dyes have reached an advanced stage in laboratory development and the RTD partners will undergo selection, modification, analysis and stability improvement tasks in order to provide the SME partners with a low cost alternative to the universally used Ruthenium dye. An ionic liquid electrolyte with tailored properties to support the dye performance will be selected and developed. The SME partners will aid in materials validation, accelerated stability testing amd lab to industrial scaling of production, and design and validate a DSSC device tuned specifically for the dye/electrolyte combination. The RTD performers in the consortium are leading European institutes in the field of DSSC, with numerous publications and patents relating to the development of the technology. The SMEs are the furthest advanced value chain members in the DSSC market, and therefore have the industrial capability to quickly exploit the results of this project. The SMEs have complementary, non-conflicting roles in the supply of materials for DSSC and the production of the final devices, and will work in cooperation to build European leadership in the DSSC market.

Keywords: dssc,photovoltaic,organic,dye,electrolyte,cell,ruthenium,ruthenium-free,porphyrine,synthesis,ionic liquid,soaking,photo-electrode,conversion efficiency,stability
INTELLIGENT WELDING CLAMP DESIGN SOFTWARE USING COMPUTER-AIDED OPTIMIZATION FOR SMES TO ACHIEVE HIGH PRECISION ASSEMBLY (CLAMPIT)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Hungary,Bulgaria,Spain,Slovakia,United Kingdom,Slovakia,Türkiye,Hungary
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-09-01
End date: 2014-08-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1509159.27
EU funding (EUR): 1147000.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

Welding workshops operated by SME companies are a basic unit of industrial manufacturing. Economic pressures are forcing these firms to find solutions for wasteful and time consuming tasks, like creation of custom clamping assemblies for each set of pieces to be welded. The design and fabrication of the clamping assembly itself involves time and costs both for design and fabrication. These clamping assemblies cannot be adapted to other production tasks, and become waste themselves. The recent assembly processes are CAD file driven, including welding processes as well. In this case the envisioned solution consists of an innovative software that can be optionally linked to existing hardware components. The software component of CLAMPIT can analyse any given option saved in the CAD file in order to determine the best conditions (e.g.: clamping angles/forces/etc., the required setup elements for clamping, the appropriate points for clamping the assembly pieces, the layout for optimised part distribution on the work-bench, the proper part order of the welding, the directions of optimised welding trajectories, etc...) to complete the welding process. Namely any task on the welding-table is driven by the processed orders of the software component what are partial utilised by the hardware components and partial should be setup according the orders handcrafted by the skilled workers. The software will give important information to the user on its own, but it can also be linked to any existing versatile clamping table on the market allowing the user to determine measurable fixing positions of the items intended to be welded.

Keywords: welding technologies,clamping (fixture) design,case based reasoning,software development
In-Line Service For Internal Inspection Of Unpiggable Buried Oil Pipelines Using Long Range Ultrasound Guided Waves In Fifty Metre Segments (PIGWAVES)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: United Kingdom,Greece,Romania,Spain,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2013-04-01
End date: 2015-03-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1046983.46
EU funding (EUR): 809813.0
Participants: 8
Project status: CLOSED

This proposal will aim to develop the enabling technology that will enable existing pipe crawling robots (pigs) to provide internal inspection of pipe walls using long range ultrasound guided waves (LRUG) deployed in pipe segments of about fifty metre length. The aim is to perform total volume inspection far more rapidly, accurately and cheaply than is presently achieved with magnetic and ultrasonic pigs by developing a circumferential collar of LRUG sensors and novel time reversal focussing to produce a map of the circumferential and axial pipe corrosion and cracks. As LRUG sensors detect all significant corrosion in oil and gas pipelines within typically 50 metre of the sensors in a few milliseconds, long lengths of pipe can be scanned very rapidly with sample wave echo patterns obtained only every 50 metres thereby data storage requirements will be orders of magnitude less than present inspection methods. The speed of travel through the pipe could thus be faster than pigs that gather data with ultrasonic compression probes. To test the technology developed by the project, the LRUG collar will be deployed initially by a mechanism to pull the collar through a pipe full of water at different constant and also varying speeds. A prototype robot will be developed that is intrinsically safe for operation in explosive environments and that is lightweight (neutrally buoyant) to investigate how best to deploy the LRUG technology in a real pipeline with faster travel and cheaper robots.

Keywords: long range ultrasonics,guided waves,scada system,umbilical free floating / swimming robot,wireless in-pipe communication,signal processing
Development and demonstration of compact, multi-source heat eXchanger technologies for renewable energy applications (RENEWX)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SME associations
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: United Kingdom,United Kingdom,Netherlands,Poland,Spain,Spain,North Macedonia,Poland
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2013-02-01
End date: 2016-01-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 2225141.06
EU funding (EUR): 1711000.0
Participants: 11
Project status: CLOSED

Europe's refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pump industry has an annual turnover of €30 billion and employs around 200,000 people. Within this industry our SME Associations represent over 1,000 SMEs within the heat pump manufacture, solar thermal system manufacture, design and installation sectors. Led by these associations the HeatXchange consortium consists of European SME associations, SME end users and some of Europe’s leading research associations. Together, we are proposing to develop new platform technologies that are relevant to our industries and their markets across Europe. The HeatXchange project will provide European manufacturers with alternative designs and manufacturing routes that will assist them expand their product range and to effectively compete with non-European competition. This will be achieved through the development and demonstration of a novel heat exchanger technology and manufacturing process that will enable increased market penetration of European-made air source type heat pump systems. The new platform technology will improve the efficiency and reduce the size of the evaporator, whilst enabling the integration of secondary or even tertiary energy sources. Overall these advanced will enable significant increases in Seasonal Performance Factors (SPF) which will improve the return on investment for consumers and hence attractiveness of EU air based heat pump systems. During the project this technology will be disseminated amongst our 1,000 members within the industry and showcased at events and conferences. Our aim is for HeatXchange to increase air-based heat pump sales by European manufacturers by at least 100,000 across Europe between 2014-2020 adding €300 million of value to Europe’s economy.

Keywords: renewable energy air source heat pump solar waste compact heat exchanger
Source tracking and monitoring of mould contamination in food production (FUST)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Norway,United Kingdom,United Kingdom,Germany,Sweden
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-11-01
End date: 2014-10-31
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1492743.4
EU funding (EUR): 1130050.1
Participants: 8
Project status: CLOSED

Microbial spoilage and contamination of fruit juices with filamentous fungi is a big problem for juice producers: 12.5-40% of juice is spoiled due to fungal contamination, that valued €4.3-14.0bn in loses annually for juice sector in Europe. Mould identification and source tracking in the food industry, in particular in the juice industry, is difficult because current technologies rely mainly on visual identification. Therefore they have low sensitivity, they are slow and expensive. The aim of FUST is to develop a system based on Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy for food spoilage source tracking and identification of fungal contamination in the juice industry which overcomes these drawbacks. The prototype to be developed within this project consists of a fully automated cultivation and liquid sample handling system for high-throughput FTIR spectroscopy and bespoke software and databases. For FTIR spectroscopy an off-the shelf routine instrument will be used. The consortium consists of SMEs that will profit from the commercialization of this system in different ways. Labman Automation, an SME specialised in developing bespoke robotic systems, automation, and electronic solutions and the future integrator of the system, wishes to commercialize the complete solution including the automated system, industrial protocol, software and databases and an off-the shelf FTIR spectrometer. The target audience of Labmann Automation will be large food companies and microbial testing laboratories. The SME Synthon GmbH, an SME specialized on FTIR for bacteria and software solutions wants to license the software and databases to Labmann Automation. The SME ScanBi Diagnostics, a molecular testing lab, wants to establish the complete system in their lab and sell it as a service to small juice and food producers.

Keywords: moulds,ftir spectroscopy,high-throughput,robotics,microcultivation
Active & Passive Sensor NETwork (APS-NET)

Framework: FP7 — Capacities
Programme: Research for the benefit of SMEs
Destination: Research for SMEs
Action type: Research for the benefit of specific groups
Countries involved: Cyprus,United Kingdom,Netherlands,Norway,Germany
Call:  (FP7-SME-2012, 2012)
Start date: 2012-12-01
End date: 2014-11-30
Duration (months): 24.0
Total project cost (EUR): 1960601.92
EU funding (EUR): 1499000.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

The increased importance of maritime transport and operations leads to more congested sea lanes. Denser sea routes increase the probability of accidents respectively collisions. The major factors that lead to the accidents on water are human error (communication, level of crew’s experience, fatigue etc.), marine traffic environment, ship and platform (structural) condition, and incompleteness/lack of properly implemented waterborne transportation safety supporting systems. Further increasing dangers like unexpected sea state conditions mean additional risks for the vessels/platforms with not only financial consequences but also loss of human lives and damage to the environment. The proposed project will provide an additional pair of “eyes” to maritime operators called the Active & Passive Sensor NETwork (APS-NET). A prototype of a flexible, multi-purpose surveillance system will be developed and tested under real life conditions. The APS-NET system provides the operator with an accurate picture that can’t be matched with any single commercial observation system today. APS-NET consists of various parts; the active sensor system, observing at close distances at 360 degrees with unprecedented high resolution, and the passive sensor system, detecting objects at greater distances by radio emissions and triangulation-like processes. Thereby it reduces numerous maritime risks such as accidental collisions with ships, rouge waves, icebergs, and so forth. The APS-NET is a network of several active and passive parts. The dynamic network structure allows shared processing between different sensors and central core processing units. Also information from other sensors onboard ships, platforms and elsewhere is shared with the APS-NET observations to increase the situational awareness of maritime operators.

Keywords: active & passive sensor system,safety on sea improvement