Completed Projects

H2OMon – In-situ Total Nutrient Analyser System for Natural Waters

Start Date: 1 November 2019  End Date: 31 October 2021

Summary of Project:                             

The H2OMon project will enable the rapid commercialisation of TelLab’s low-cost in-situ multi-parameter nutrient water pollutant monitoring system. It is funded under the European H2020 SME Instrument Phase 2 (Grant Agreement number: 880886) and TelLab is the sole participant.

The complexity, short deployment endurance and high cost of current in-situ monitoring systems make them unaffordable and impractical for many users to put into practice – especially true for small operations. The H2OMon integrated nitrate/phosphorous/ammonia all natural water monitoring system, is rooted in the clear market-pull caused by the industrial and domestic need to comply with increasingly tightly policed water nutrient pollution regulations, infringements of which carry heavy fines.

Our solution is a multi-parameter autonomous microfluidic device with in-situ calibration and high -frequency measurements over long deployment periods. Its in-built communication system and process control add-on enable the user to remotely monitor water quality in lakes, rivers, estuaries and coastal zones; alerting them via immediate warning on the detection of a pollutant and enabling immediate action to be taken to limit environmental damage.

For more details, please go to the H2OMon project webpage and the Aquamonitrix website.

Life Ecosens Aquamonitrix – Enhanced Portable Sensor for
 Water Quality Monitoring, moving to genuinely integrated Water Resource Management

Start Date: 2 July 2018  End Date: 31 March 2021                                

Summary of Project:

This project consolidates research outputs from previous R&D projects carried out by TelLab  to demonstrate & bring to market a novel water quality monitoring integrated solution to meet the requirements for frequent water quality monitoring under the Water Framework Directive.

The consortium, led by TelLab is made up of the Finnish company, Kemira, the Spanish companies, LKS Ingeneria and ISEA, the Spanish university Unversidad Catolica San Antonio de Murcia as well as the Universidade Nova de Lisboa from Portugal. Various water companies/authorities are also participating from Spain and Finland as project collaborators, e.g. the Bilbao Water Consortium which will make their facilities available for carrying out tests on the water quality sensor. this project is funded under the European Life Programme (Grant Agreement number: LIFE 17  ENV/IE/000237).

For more details, please go to the Life Ecosens Aquamonitrix project website.

Holifab Project  – Holistic digital-to-physical prototyping and production pilot for microfluidic MEMS

Start Date: 1 Nov 2017     End Date: 30 April 2021                                                           

Summary of Project:

This project is funded under H2020 – INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP – Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Nanotechnologies (Grant agreement number: 760927). It aims at a holistic new design strategy, coordinated pilot lines and business model for the prototyping, fabrication and commercialization of polymer-based microfluidic systems. It stems from the recognition that a microfluidic chip is a key part of a microfluidic MEMS, but only a part. Many limitations to fast prototyping, industrialization and ultimate performances lie not in the chip itself, but in the world-to-chip connections and integration of multiple external components. We shall address in a single strategy the streamlined construction of whole microfluidic systems, starting from existing pilot lines in injection moulding, 3D printing and instrument construction.

First, the resolution of 3D printing will be increased by a factor at least 10, down to 1~3μm, with a throughput 10 to 100x higher than that of current high resolution 3D printing machines, to support the flexible production of chips with complex 3D architectures. New soft, bio, environment-friendly and/or active materials will be integrated in the production chain using a technology patented by the partners. Large-scale markets requiring mass production at the lowest cost will be addressed by a fully integrated pilot line, streamlining injection moulding of raw chips, reagents and components integration, sealing and quality control. Intercompatibility between 3D printing and injection moulding, regarding architectures and materials, will be developed to accelerate the prototype to product value chain. After development and upscaling, the technology will be demonstrated and qualified in operational environment by end-users with lab-on-chip applications in health (cancer diagnosis, organ-on chip) and environment (water control).

TelLab’s Contribution:

TelLab will demonstrate environmental applications of the prototype devices with deployments in the field, and will perform validation through evaluation against comparative techniques in the TelLab ISO 17025 accredited laboratory.

For more details regarding the project and our partners, please go to the Holifab website.

Optimised self-calibrating microfluidic systems for in-situ environmental monitoring

Start Date: 05 December 2016; End Date: 31 May 2020

PhD Student: Nile Quane

Nile has a first class BSc (Hons) in Physics with Biomedical Sciences from Dublin City University. In DCU, Nile’s final year project was based on design optimisation of microfluidic platforms using CFD simulations, supervised by the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute.

Summary of Project:

The research is a joint venture between T.E. Laboratories and Lancaster University. Water analysis testing is typically completed using manually obtained samples sent for laboratory analysis. This is both infrequent and laborious. In-situ sensors are becoming increasingly common in environmental monitoring due to their ease of deployment, more frequent testing and regulatory pressure such as the EU Water Framework Directive. Some issues in long-term sensor deployment include cost, sensor lifetime and data quality over the deployment period. Frequent servicing is infeasible for numerous deployed sensors, particularly where these are in hard-to-reach or otherwise inaccessible locations. Nile’s PhD looks at adaptation of the company’s Aquamonitrix device to improve sensor quality and deployment time.

Inspiration – Managing soil and groundwater impacts from agriculture for sustainable intensification

Start Date: 1 April 2016 ; End Date: 31 March 2020

Summary of Project:

Inspiration was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) funded Innovative Training Network (ITN) (Grant Agreement Number: 675120). Agriculture is vital to Europe’s prosperity. However, while agricultural production in Europe has significantly increased food security it has also damaged soil and water resources and ecosystem biodiversity and contributed to climate change.

Further intensification of production to support population growth must be sustainable to minimise future environmental impacts and negative externalities.

Sustainability is critically underdeveloped in European farming practices. However, it can reduce the environmental impacts of commercial-scale farming in Europe and increase the productivity of poor quality land in urban and industrialised areas, which may be contaminated. This offers huge opportunities to restore degraded land to re-use, return this asset to communities, ensure local food supply and increase the agricultural capacity of urban land, otherwise unsuitable for commercial-scale farming. It contributes to food security, by reducing the need for new land elsewhere. This is possible in many European cities, outlying areas and peripheral rural environments.

Addressing this challenge and improving Europe’s soil and water resources for future agricultural use requires innovative sustainable management concepts, which must consider environmental, technical, social and economic factors. Decision-making frameworks and predictive tools must also be developed to implement sustainable agricultural practices and devise measures to mitigate impacts. These approaches must be developed from the farm- to catchment-scale within European agricultural landscapes. This requires an integrated analysis represented in the INSPIRATION (managing soil and groundwater impacts from agriculture for sustainable intensification) project.

TelLab’s contribution:

TelLab hosted and supervised an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) as part of Work Package 4, Mitigation of soil and groundwater impacts from agriculture using mixed waste media. The ESR has identified various suitable locally-sourced raw/waste materials (nutrient rich) which are safe to recycle back onto land and be used as fertiliser. The ESR continues her PhD after the project end.

For more details regarding the project and our partners, please go to the Inspiration website

AtlantOS – Optimising and Enhancing the Integrated Atlantic 

Ocean Observing System                                                                                       

Start Date:  1 April 2015; End Date: 30 September 2019

Summary of Project:

The vision of AtlantOS was to improve and innovate Atlantic observing by using the Framework of Ocean Observing to obtain an international, more sustainable, more efficient, more integrated, and fit-for-purpose system contributing to the Trans-Atlantic Research Alliance, the GEO (Group on Earth Observations) global initiative Blue Planet, and GOOS (Global Ocean Observing Systems). The AtlantOS initiative will have a long-lasting and sustainable contribution to the societal, economic and scientific benefit arising from this integrated approach, achieved by improving the extent, completeness, quality and ease of access to Atlantic Ocean data required by industries, product supplying agencies, scientist and citizens.

TelLab’s contribution:

The R & D Department were partners in Work Package 6 Cross-cutting issues and emerging networks. TelLab worked closely with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton who is the leader of this Work Package.

The aim of this Work Package was to enhance Integrated Atlantic Ocean Observing System (IAOOS) capabilities to sample water and particles for biological and (meta)genomic analysis, through sensor development and TelLab’s main contribution was in the development of a marine sampler.

For more details regarding the project and our partners, please go to the AtlantOS website.

ACTTiVAte Project – support for innovative

SMEs                                                        

Start Date: 1 Dec 2017   End Date: 31 Jan 2018

This project was supported by the ACTTiVAte project consortium and was financed by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Program under Grant Agreement 691473. It supported innovative SMEs to enable the emergence of new cross-border and cross-sectoral value chains through fostering technology transfer within four sectors with strong synergies: Aerospace, Agro-food, Health and ICT.  ACTTiVAte experts provided support through the provision of business support services such as training workshops, mentoring, brokerage events, mobility exchange programs and investment forums to ensure the innovative projects developed a marketable product.

Tellab’s aim was to combine three distinct technologies in an innovative way to produce a soil monitoring sampler for the agro-food industry.

For more details regarding the project and partners please go to http://acttivate.eu/

Marine sensors for the 21st Century

Start Date: 1 October 2013 ; End Date: 30 September 2017

Summary of Project:

SenseOCEAN brought together world leading marine sensor developers to create a highly integrated multifunctional and cost-effective in situ marine biogeochemical sensor system. The marine environment plays an essential role in the earth’s climate as well as providing resources, recreational opportunities and acting as a vital transportation route. However, the inherent vastness of the oceans means that our ability to monitor the health of this important system remains limited.

This project provided a quantum leap in the ability to measure crucial biogeochemical parameters. Innovations were combined with state of the art sensor technology to produce a modular sensor system that can be deployed on many platforms. Prototypes were optimised for scale-up and commercialisation.

TelLab’s contribution:

TelLab’s main involvement was in Work Package 1 Development of Core Technologies, where we were working on achieving cost savings, by leading the development of a cassette-based reagent / standard pack that can be replaced by the user (even in the field). This directly addressed the complexity and cost of the existing state of the art microfluidic systems. We were also involved in the Exploitation and Dissemination tasks of the project.

For more details regarding the project and our partners, please go to http://www.senseocean.eu/

Next Generation Analytical Platforms for Environmental Sensing 

Start Date: 1 December 2013 ; End Date: 31 May 2017  

Summary of Project:

This project investigated ways to deliver revolutionary advances in liquid/sample handling combined with new approaches to performing sensitive in situ analytical measurements. The goal of the project was to drive down the unit cost of these instruments by orders of magnitude to levels that can create a tipping point, at which the technology becomes ubiquitous.

PROJECT OUTCOMES:

Development of novel technologies that will contribute significantly to the realisation of next generation autonomous analytical instruments for distributed environmental monitoring.

New services based on the information generated by these instruments in real deployment scenarios.

Photoactuated polymer valve structures fully integrated within microfluidic channels.

Highly sensitive detector integrated with microfluidics sample preparation.

Photocontrolled functions such as filtering, preconcentration, uptake and release, surface activation/passivation.

TelLab’s contribution:

TelLab, as the leader of Work Package 3 “Sampling and Pre-concentration,”  focused on the development of a portable pre-concentration method for analytes using reverse osmosis, e.g. Ammonia, Phosphate, Nitrate, Nitrite, Iron, Manganese. Potentially this system can be used where the concentration of analytes is lower than the Limits of Detection.

TelLab was also the leader of Work Package 8 “Deployment of systems” where we were responsible for the deployment of prototypes. Additionally we were involved in all dissemination and exploitation activities.

For more details regarding the project and our partners, please go to http://www.napes.eu/

Cost-effective sensors, interoperable with international existing

ocean observing systems to meet EU policy  requirements.

Start Date:  1 November 2013; End Date: 28 February 2017   

Summary of Project: 

This project aimed to develop integrated and effective data acquisition systems by developing innovative sensors, interoperable with international existing ocean observing systems to meet EU marine policies such as the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Common Fisheries Policy. 

TelLab’s contribution:

TelLab’s main involvement was in the following Work Packages (WPs):

• WP 2 Integrated basis for cost-effective sensors development
• WP 5 Sensors for in-situ monitoring of Eutrophication
• WP 7 Sensors for in-situ monitoring of heavy metals

Our tasks included extensive laboratory testing and comparing of reference samples with the sensor results. We were also involved in the dissemination and exploitation of the project through attendance at Trade Shows and conferences. 

For more details regarding the project and our partners, please go to http://www.commonsenseproject.eu/