Driven by concerns regarding global warming, air quality and human health, there is a clear trend toward increased sales of light-duty diesel vehicles in many parts of the world. This trend can result in many positive environmental benefits including low fuel consumption, and therefore low levels of CO2, CO, HC and volatile hydrocarbons. However, increased diesel sales have a downside, relatively high NOx and particulate emissions. As a result, countries around the world are increasingly tightening diesel regulations with the result that engine and reducing emissions technologies continues to advance, and reformulated diesel fuels continue to appear. In this context, the overall objective of this research project is to characterise physically and chemically particulate matter (PM) emissions from light-duty diesel vehicles and engines. The research pretends to assist in the setting of future regulation limits on PM emissions for this type of vehicles, addressing last generation diesel engines (direct injection), advanced particle emission reduction technologies (diesel particle filters) and novel diesel fuels (biodiesel). For that purpose, a new system for PM sampling and measurement will be developed and assessed in order to allow for accurate, repeatable and reproducible measurements of particles in the exhaust of diesel vehicles, mostly in the ultrafine and nanometer range, at the low emission levels from the technologies anticipated for the future market and at the stringency levels expected in future legislations. The project will be carried out in the vehicle and engine emissions laboratory (VELA) at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EU in Ispra (Italy). VELA has facilities to test emissions from engines and vehicles of all sizes, including a double dilution tunnel for measuring particles and gaseous ultra-low emissions (ULEV).

In addition to their traditional roles as seals and diaphragms, components made of rubber-like materials are increasingly replacing traditional metallic components (cams,slides) due to their ease of manufacture, lightness and cost. However, industrial stakeholders suffer from a lack of understanding of the time-dependent tribological behaviour of rubber-like materials (lubrication, wear & friction mechanisms). Moreover, surface modifications to improve tribological properties of rubber-like materials are rather unexplored, and the few existing coatings (graphite layers, PE layers or water based lacquers) suffer from a low wear resistance and bad adhesion. Therefore, understanding&modelling tribological behaviour of rubber-like materials is a mandatory step towards a knowledge-based engineering of their surfaces. Indeed, a radical innovation in the tribological behaviour of these materials can only be achieved through an integrated R&D approach for the development of advanced thin films. Hence, the overall objective of KRISTAL is to deliver innovative coating&surfacing techniques and associated modelling tools, to industrial partners for them to integrate tribology as a main design criteria of sealing&sliding systems using rubber-like materials. Because understanding tribological behaviour at nanoscale is a mandatory step to control tribological functions at macroscale, research will be carried out on three levels; going from nanoscale, then microscale to macro scale. This innovative approach will enable KRISTAL industrial consortium to: - develop quick and cost-effective design methods of sliding /sealing systems by considering tribological aspects - control friction during the life of the component by tailored surface engineering - minimize the environmental impact (noise, vibration, leakage, lubricant) of sliding /sealing systems by considering tribological aspects - obtain self-lubricating and long-life (maintennance free) sliding systems.

This proposal is for an IIF award to enable a researcher from India to visit a laboratory in the UK and develop: (i) new scientific skills; (ii) a lasting collaboration within the UK; and (iii) potential to increase the research capacity of his home research environment.The science of the proposal aims at understanding chemical mechanisms and catalyst design factors that influence degradation of selected pesticides by particle photocatalysts in aqueous solution. This understanding will be used to design & synthesise more efficient TiO2 photocatalysts for the destruction of priority organic pollutants.The latter will be achieved using nanoparticle production technologies to synthesize surface & composition modified catalysts. For modification of composition, we propose to produce innovative P25 analogues - in particular, to control the rutile crystallite size, anatase porocity and anatase/rutile ratio and to optimize the reactivity of the catalyst with respect to those parameters. For modification of the surface, we propose to conduct a novel study of the efficiencies of photodegradation of hydro-phobic/philic pesticides on samples of TiO2 that have been pretreated to render their surfaces highly hydrophilic & highly hydrophobic, so allowing assessment of the respective efficiencies of dynamic & static photodegradation mechanisms for each class of pollutant. We also propose to use the Quartz Crystal Microbalance to measure substrate adsorption at the catalyst surface in real time and most especially during a photodegradation experiment.The intermediates & mechanism through which the pesticides of interests are destroyed by these modified photocatalysts will also be investigated. Experiments will be conducted to map the A->B->C etc degradation route of each pollutant and to study how competition effects influence this process. To prevent adverse environmental impact, toxicity of photodegradation intermediates will be assessed and compared with the parent molecule.

The abatement of the environmental problems is one of the biggest challenges of technology today. This requires investment in new and clean processes. The development and implementation of new production and separation processes may result in a green industrial revolution. Nanotechnology and membrane technology has many opportunities in this respect. Membrane systems offer lower costs, less maintenance, more flexibility, and significant environmental and product quality advantages than the conventional technologies and can be applied to a wide variety of industries. While membrane systems can perform difficult separations not possible with other technologies, nanotechnology gives new opportunities for cleaner production. Since the use of nanotechnologies and membrane technologies in industry is new, the end-users, located in the Associate Candidate Countries (ACC), have not yet compiled and homogenized information. There is a great need within the end users in the ACCs to be informed about the application areas, the type of applications, and organic compound separation, recovery and reduce. This will be achieved by means of a symposium and dissemination of results obtained so far. The symposium will lead to integrate the knowledge of excellent experts in this field. The aim of the project is to unify and coordinate the efforts of the scientists working in the Application of Nanotechnologies for Separation and Recovery of Volatile Organic Compounds from Waste Air Streams. These are planning to be performed via symposium activities. During these activites effect of integration of the knowledge of excellent experts in nanotechnologies, membrane technologies and air pollution prevention in the field discussed is planning to be accomplished. In practice this will be an attempt for effective cooperation of academic and scientific researcher from one side with industrial, national and local administration, from another side.

Flammability is a major limiting factor for the expansion of polymer materials. The potential contribution of polymer materials to development of technologies with reduced environmental impact, may thus be missed. Fire retardant approaches developed in the past can no longer be used owing to undesirable side effects during fire retardance action and hindrance to end of life recycling technologies. Worldwide research in this area has not yet provided a suitable solution in terms of simultaneous fire risk and fire hazard reduction. However, new classes of nanocomposite materials and inorganic-organic hybrids can be rendered inherently fire retardant if their decomposition behavior is catalytically directed towards ceramisation and charring with creation of a surface protection to the polymer material. Particularly interesting in this approach are polyhedralsilsesquioxanes (POSS), carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and needle-like silicates with which the project deals. The success in implementing the ceramisatìon-charring mechanism, requires a combination of expertise encompassing deep knowledge in polymer chemistry and engineering, polymer thermal degradation and combustion, inorganic and physical chemistry and catalysis that could assist in performing a great breakthrough in an area that is of vital importance to our technological development. The partners of the Consortium proposing the project cover all these areas at a highly qualified level which is necessary to produce the substantial progress in basic knowledge on the fiammability of polymer nanocomposites and hybrids required to create an environmentally friendly highly performing new approach in fire retardance. Beside fire retardance, the inorganic nanophases are suitable carriers for distributing functional molecules in the polymer matrix that can lead to multifunctional materials with a whole range of applications such as transport, electrical and electronic sector, building, furniture, clothing, etc.

The proposed work targets a specific branch of material science, solid metal fluorides with functionalised surfaces. It is both fundamental and applied in nature and comprises innovative synthesis, highly sophisticated characterisation, simulation/modelling and applications. The objective is to explore the upper limits of surface area, porosity, acidity and thermal stability achievable for these materials. Highly innovative synthetic approaches, including a recently developed non-aqueous route to very high surface area aluminium(lll) fluoride, will be used to obtain fluorides and fluorinated oxides of different metals, having characteristics far exceeding those exhibited by currently known forms. Specific synthetic goals are to obtain solid fluorides with surface areas ten times higher than presently known and with extremely high Lewis acidity; particular attention will be given to aluminium-containing materials. Synthesis will be combined with broad physicochemical characterisation, including highly advanced in situ methodologies supported by predictive simulation/modelling techniques, all geared to understand the underlying processes at molecular- and nano-levels. As a result, processes to control, tailor and modify target characteristics of the relevant materials for specific applications will be established. Mid-term innovation activities will be performed by the SME on two reactions of current technological importance. Replacement of widely used homogeneous Lewis acids, such as antimony(V) fluoride, by environmentally more acceptable, newly developed solid acids is a longer term technological goal, having high economic and environmental impacts. The use of fluoride materials in areas not directly connected with fluorine chemistry, for example in industrial acid catalysed processes employing Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation, is the third possible application.

The training programme, deals with the scientific area of colloids and particles in the natural aquatic environment,particularly freshwaters such as rivers and groundwaters. It will train 15 early stage researches in thequantitative understanding of this area of environmental chemistry and biology. In particular training will be inthe understanding of colloid influence on pollutant fate and behaviour. This area is of great importance andrelevance to the future of environmental sciences and will play a significant role in promoting future research inthe field of sustainable development and to lesser extent in areas such as Nanotechnology. The early stagefellows will also be trained (and assessed) in more generic skills (e.g. Researche Project Management, ObtainingResearch Funding etc), communicating with society and transferable skills (e.g oral and written communication,ethics, health and safety etc.). The training programme wille have a Scientist in Charge (Dr Lead), immediatelysupported by a research team (4 staff members), supervisory boards (20 further staff, with overlap) and trainingcourse leaders (approximately 20 additional staff). In addition, much support will come from the technical staff,other early stage researchers and other departments from the University. In particular, Staff development Unit,Information Services and Press Office. The Host is fully capable of meeting the training needs of the Fellows.Early stage researchers will be a mixture of PhD students registered at Birmingham University and fellows attending from other European research institutes. The early stage researchers registered for PhDs will beexpected to actively collaborate with a substantial number of other research groups, enhancing their mobility and training. A large number of collaborations with university and SME research groups have been fostered withinthis proposal. Further collaborations will also be developed during the proposal lifetime.

PERSONA aims at advancing the paradigm of Ambient Intelligence through the harmonisation of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies and concepts for the development of sustainable and affordable solutions for the social inclusion and independent living of Senior Citizen, integrated in a common semantic framework. It will develop a scalable open standard technological platform to build a broad range of AAL Services, to demonstrate and test the concept in real life implementations, assessing their social impact and establishing the initial business strategy for future deployment of the proposed technologies and services. The main challenges of PERSONA are: - To find solutions and develop AAL Services for social inclusion, for support in daily life activities, for early risk detection , for personal protection from health and environmental risks, for support in mobility and displacements - To develop a technological platform that allows the seamless and natural access to those services indicated above,. - To create a psychologically pleasant and easy- to- use integrated solutions - To demonstrate that the solutions found are affordable and sustainable for all the actors and stakeholders involved: elderly citizens living, welfare systems, service providers in the AAL market. The PERSONA technical platform will exploit and incorporate a broad range of relevant technologies which are developed and integrated in the project: AAL system reference architecture, micro- and nano-electronics, embedded systems, Human Machine Interfaces , Communication , software, web and network technologies, biosensors, embedded and distributed sensors, energy generation and control technologies, and intelligent software to tools for decision support. An important measure of success for the project will come from the outcome of the evaluation and validation in extensive test-beds and trials in three sites in Spain, Italy, and Denmark .

Since about 1950 various materials have been propagated for the conservation of stained glass, including epoxy resins, acrylates and polyurethanes. For all conservation materials on stained glass there is a substantial lack of assessment of treatments after decades of natural weathering. Since most of the applied materials cause problems nowadays, the introduction of innovative and promissing new preservation strategies and materials are necessary. The aim of this project is to secure the conservation of stained glass windows as an important part of our European cultural heritage. Therefore, the proposal has been conceived with the following objectives: - to evaluate a representative variation of conservation materials on selected original objects after natural weathering; - to optimise and apply advanced non-destructive analytical methods and molecular biological tools for understanding long-term effects of conservation treatments and biodeterioration; - to investigate the degree of reversibility of ancient materials; - to propose remediation strategies based on treatments and re-treatability tests with modern materials and to improve preservation strategies by indroducing innovative conservation materials based on nano-porous glass phases, derived from colloidal silica sols and stabilised by glass fibre components (glass-in-glass consolidants). The pilot objects have been chosen in five different European countries, providing different restoration history and including both, medieval windows as well as objects from the 19th/20th century. Apart from classical analytical methods (optical microscopy, IR, SEM) advanced non-destructive methods (confocal micro-Raman spectroscopy, microfocus and phase contrast X-ray tomography, mCT) and biochemical methods will be applied. The project team consist of eleven partners from seven countries, including research institutes, universities, public authorities and SMEs.

Calcite (CaCO3) plays a role in many public and industrial regimes that are critical for the health and economic well-being of society, but in many cases, a lack of understanding of the fundamental physical and chemical properties controlling calcite growth and dissolution translates to direct problems or to inefficiency in water treatment processes. A common method for removing toxic trace-metal contamination during water treatment is to add lime (Ca(OH)2 or CaO). Trace metals are trapped in growing calcite as Ca combines with CO3 from the water. However, production of lime requires burning of calcite, often in the form of limestone or chalk. This emits CO2, and though some CO2 is consumed during water treatment, considerable energy is required for lime production, which also contributes to the atmospheric carbon load. If a method could be developed to treat water directly with natural calcite, without first converting it to lime, considerable energy could be saved and CO2 emissions could be reduced. We will investigate methods to alter the surface properties of chalk, to make it more effective at trapping trace metals. Our approach is to promote Ostwald ripening, the natural process where small particles dissolve to provide material for growth of larger particles. The growing calcite traps trace-metals, removing them from the water. To achieve this, we will apply nano-technological methods for characterising particle surfaces and use a bio-technological approach to develop environmentally friendly enzymes that can degrade the organic coatings on chalk particles, which are known to inhibit natural recrystallisation. The Science and Technology results will lead to improved treatment processes for clean drinking water, and a decreased need for lime production with less consequent emissions of CO2, thus significantly improving energy efficiency and environment sustainability.