Bovine respiratory disease (BRD), and resulting pneumonia caused by viral and/or bacterial pathogens, is the most common disease affecting the cattle industry globally. Calf pneumonia is a cause of major economic loss, affecting over a million animals across the UK and costing the UK dairy industry ~£60-80million pa.
While BRD can affect up to 50% of cattle, with resulting fatalities of up to 10%, half of all cases are often not detected or treated at the time of infection, potentially resulting in a lifelong reduction in productivity and costing up to an estimated £1k per infected animal.
Detection of BRD/pneumonia in calves is currently through clinical signs, usually first identified, and often treated, by the farmer with the application of anti-inflammatories and/or antibiotics. However, many of these symptoms can be subtle, or an indication of other diseases.
Early stage diagnosis of BRD in calves provides a means for early intervention to effectively treat the disease, and limit its spread, reducing the use of antibiotics, improving animal welfare, and increasing lifelong potential milk yields by as much as 8%.
The innovation delivered by this project is a fast response capnometer for early stage diagnosis and management of BRD/pneumonia respiratory conditions. This technique has been successfully deployed for use in diagnosis/ management of chronic respiratory conditions in humans, supported by previous input from team members in this project.
Competitive techniques include remote temperature sensing and behaviour monitoring, neither of which are specific to respiratory disease but could be complementary to the proposed sensor system.
This project draws on Albasense's novel fast-response solid state gas sensor technology; Wideblue's electro-mechanical systems design and integration; Paragon's veterinary expertise; and McCaskie's knowledge of innovative technologies in the sector, to address this key challenge of the dairy industry.
At a time when skilled labour is at an all-time low and input costs high, improving productivity and margins for dairy farmers is critical to sustaining the UK industry and dairy supply chain. The adoption of novel sensing technologies can add value beyond the mere financial, for overstretched and under pressure farmers.
Micro-LED HAPS aims to demonstrate an innovative optical communications system designed for deployment on high-altitude pseudo satellites (HAPS). Our approach exploits the unique capabilities of micro light-emitting diode (micro-LED) sources paired with single photon detectors. The compact nature of these integrated optical components and their low power consumption, make them well suited for the development of transceiver modules compatible with the tight size, weight, and power constraints of HAPS. Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics (Fh-CAP), shall lead the project, which builds upon the world-leading expertise of the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde (IOP), who have pioneered the development of micro-LEDs over two decades. Together with TAO Tech UK, Wideblue, A2E, and Kubos Semiconductor, they will advance the commercialisation of these devices, for the increasingly important optical communications market.
The main objective for the project will be to demonstrate an optical communications link in a representative environment to de-risk future high altitude testing. The innovation here is the use of bespoke micro-LED arrays paired with single-photon detectors to enable low power and lightweight data links to be demonstrated. These data links can provide the vital command and control signals between HAPS platforms and between HAPS to the ground.
By thus expanding the communications capabilities of HAPS, we will enhance their utility for rapid deployment in various scenarios, such as Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief (HADR) or Maritime Security missions, and more generally providing communications in remote locations poorly served by fixed infrastructure.
Precision timing is key to all aspects of modern infrastructure, from the national grid, to telecommunications, to financial trading, through to global, national, and individual navigation systems.
When we switch on our smartphones or satellite navigation systems, we are unconsciously using networked oscillators utilising the performance of current commercial atomic clocks. The exact sychronization of these oscillators is necessary to make much of today's technology work and it also underpins many precision experiments in research laboratories. As outlined in the UK Blackett Report on Global Navigation Satellite System dependencies, we are very dependent upon precision frequency and time transfer.
However, these signals do not have guaranteed security, either through their ownership (the GPS system is run by the US Air Force) or due to the vulnerability of the wireless signal to hacking or jamming. There is an urgent need for a UK source of clocks to protect core infrastructure. Additionally, the development of a step-change in the accuracy and stability of timing and frequency sources will drive new technologies, including faster telecoms and ever more secure communication protocols, precision navigation for autonomous transport networks and earth observation techniques to monitor climate change.
This project brings a team of leading UK universities with many decades expertise in atomic physics together with industry leaders specialising in optical systems engineering to deliver a world leading miniature optical system for atom cooling, trapping and probing. This innovative approach will generate a source of optically trapped strontium atoms suitable to deliver highly accurate time referenced to atomic standards. Ultimately, this technology could be employed in a fully isolated clock that is capable of providing a GNSS-surpassing timing standard at the heart of future autonomous vehicles and critical infrastructure networks.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) facilitates the secure sharing of encryption keys using quantum technology. These keys can encrypt data for transmission over conventional fibre links across any distance, but QKD itself is limited over fibre to around 150km with current technology. Beyond this, 'trusted nodes' are required, but at major risk of creating security vulnerabilities. A number of dark fibre QKD networks are being built, including in the UK, but all are subject to this constraint. QKD through free space is less sensitive to distance. Thus, satellites provide the means for distributing keys across very large distances between end users spread across countries or continents - they are a facilitator of global QKD networks. Satellite components in QKD networks are being planned or researched in a number of countries. A consortium led by Arqit aims to establish the world's first commercial QKD satellite constellation. The first satellite is being built under contract with the European Space Agency, with further satellite already being developed.
This project aims to overcome important barriers to the adoption of QKD based infrastructure and services by government customers that will need accreditation. We will establish sector specific demonstrators of the service prior to satellite launch to support live end to end demonstrations, enabling customer integration to accelerate adoption; develop QKD optimised detectors to enhance performance of optical ground receivers whilst reducing cost; address operational security by performing practical side channel attacks on key elements of the system; and develop satellite specific QKD standards, supported by generating portable test equipment to support interoperability testing with other satellite QKD systems.
**Magnetic resonance imaging** (**MRI**) is a powerful tool for diagnosing medical conditions that affect the brain. Standard MRI scanners in current use have a magnetic-field strength of 1.5 tesla (1.5T) or 3 tesla (3T). Recent advances have led to scanners with a magnetic-field strength of 7 tesla (7T), which provide images with an increased level of detail. These systems now have approval for medical use in Europe and the USA. This project concerns the commercial development of new technology that will enhance the performance of these new 7T scanners.
Neurological conditions, including brain tumours, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone and vascular disease will significantly benefit from the introduction of 7T MRI. This promises to improve diagnosis and help clinicians to deliver more targeted, personalised and effective treatments. Despite this potential, the introduction of 7T MRI into clinical use has been impeded by the difficulty to acquire uniform images of a large area of anatomy, such as the whole brain. This is a fundamental limitation caused by the shorter radiofrequency wavelength at 7T. Parallel transmit (pTx) technology provides the means to overcome this problem and produce uniform images.
The project is based on an existing research project at the University of Glasgow, which has resulted in the development of a prototype of a novel head coil for MRI of the brain at 7T. The new coil incorporates pTx technology, which improves image uniformity and offers better visualisation of brain regions that are important in the management of epilepsy, MS and vascular disease. Furthermore, an open-face design improves patient comfort and minimises claustrophobia. The compact design is operator friendly and saves space on the patient table.
Modern 7T MRI scanners operate in two modes: a technologically advanced pTx mode, and a conventional single-transmit (sTx) mode. The new coil is designed to be used in both modes, whereas separate coils are currently required. This dual-mode feature prevents the need for two coils, which is a considerable cost saving to the consumer and is time-efficient.
Our goal is to translate the prototype head coil into a medical device suitable for clinical diagnostic use. The first stage in this process is to develop the new head coil through ISO 13485 quality management systems and achieve corresponding certification. This project will demonstrate performance and safety of the device using computer modelling, phantom studies and healthy volunteer imaging to prepare for subsequent evaluation in a clinical setting.
Project LUSS (**L**ED based **U**ltra-Violet exposure for **S**afe **S**urfaces) provides an economical solution to combat COVID-19 with the ability to also disinfect surfaces of other viruses and bacteria.
COVID-19 has raised the importance of preventing viruses spreading between individuals in their daily routines, e.g. touching door handles, entering rooms where infected people reside or have recently departed. Continuous cleaning of door panels using disinfecting chemicals is impractical. LUSS intends to exploit a particular spectrum of Ultra-Violet (UV) light to provide a simple and efficient means of killing COVID-19 and other viruses, providing additional potential in wider settings for the future.
MicroLink Devices (MLD), lead industrial partner with support from WideBlue (WB), Industrial partner and Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult (CSAC), Research Technology Organisation will initially develop an automatically self-cleaning door panel, exploiting specific UV light, that will kill viruses/bacteria and prevent the spread of infection. The door panel will automatically operate every time someone enters a room/building. Therefore, cleaning staff's time can be directed at other areas where traditional disinfection is required.
Project deliverable will be a low-cost door panel UV Disinfection System and can be easily retrofitted. It will be re-chargeable battery powered, supplemented by indoor light harvesting solar cells to power the LEDs potentially substantially reducing operating costs and reducing the requirement for frequent battery changes.
MLD will provide overall project management and lead the system design and production of prototype door panel, system and component testing and final test at end-ser site. WB will design the electronics for the demonstrator door panel which will involve PCB modelling, design and test for prototype and demonstrator. CSAC will support use case definition, define initial design parameters for the prototype door panel and perform testing of components for build and safety efficacy.
Precision timing is key to all aspects of modern infrastructure, from the national grid, to telecommunications, to financial trading, through to global, national, and individual navigation systems. In most cases this timing is received wirelessly through global navigation satellite systems, commonly known as "sat-nav" or GPS. However, these signals do not have guaranteed security, either through their ownership (the GPS system is run by the US Air Force) or due to the vulnerability of the wireless signal to hacking or jamming. There is an urgent need for a UK source of clocks to protect core infrastructure. Additionally, the development of a step-change in the accuracy and stability of timing and frequency sources will drive new technologies, including faster telecoms and ever more secure communication protocols, precision navigation for autonomous transport networks and earth observation techniques to monitor climate change.This project brings a team of leading UK universities with many decades expertise in atomic physics together with industry leaders specialising in nanofabrication and optical systems engineering to deliver a world leading miniature optical system for atom cooling. This innovative approach will generate a source of ultra-cold strontium atoms suitable to deliver highly accurate time referenced to atomic standards. Ultimately, this technology could be employed in a fully isolated clock that is capable of providing a GNSS-surpassing timing standard at the heart of future autonomous vehicles and critical infrastructure networks.
This project seeks to reduce the costs of offshore wind by targeting the wind monitoring infrastructure used at multiple stages of wind energy projects. By developing a factory adaptable laser wind sensor design the costs of such remote sensor systems can be reduced - by using a modular approach to the subsystem design, maintenance and down time costs can be reduced. The outputs from this project will include field demonstrators of different wind profilers set up for different applications. These wind profilers are based on LIDAR - (LIght Detection And Ranging) and the project brings together wind LIDAR developers, optical product designers, ruggedised optical instrumentation engineers as well as the wind industry end user. The project will make use of wind energy test sites in the UK and also in Germany - where a parallel project - looking at wind LIDAR vertical profiling and validation methods is being set up.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a well understood application of quantum technology and there are several metropolitan fibre networks already established for QKD services. However, key distribution is limited by absorption inside optical fibres which mean that transmissions over distances greater than about 150 km are impractical. Free space communications, though, does not suffer the same degree of attenuation and single photon communication with satellites orbiting the Earth at several hundred kilometres has been demonstrated. Satellites then, provide an ideal vehicle for distributing quantum key information across very large distances between end users spread across countries or continents. However, in order to benefit from the advances in satellite technology, a network of Optical Ground Receivers (OGRs) are required to receive and detect the photons carrying the key information. The UK, as a major player in the development of advanced optical & photonic technologies, is well positioned to address this future market for OGR. This project works with users to specify OGR requirements and prototypes and tests a QKD receiver, whilst designing and making plans for scaled manufacture in the UK.
"The automation of Operation and Maintenance (O&M) practices in offshore wind sector is central to driving lower costs. The remote location of offshore wind farms means any requirement for physical human intervention pushes O&M costs upwards. This contributes to making the cost of getting offshore wind energy to our homes the second highest in the UK. Until now, it has been difficult to automate lubricating oil analysis processes that provide wind farm project owners and Original Equipment Manufacturer's (OEMs) crucial machine health information on key turbine components such as the gearbox and drivetrain. This resulted in breakdown of about 32,000 gearboxes globally last year alone. Such breakdowns could have been detected early by the right technology.
Diagnosing early, potential failure of component parts in a wind turbine is critical to turbine operations. RAB-Microfluidics has developed cutting edge microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology to deliver real-time continuous testing and analysis of lubricating oil. Our ""Lab-on-a-Chip"" technology delivers oil analysis 1000x faster and 10x cheaper than the current ""send the sample to the Laboratory"" approach. Analysis of contaminants in engine oil, gearboxes, drivetrains etc. is a well-established method of detecting problems. This procedure is called Oil Condition Monitoring. We deliver this onsite, in real time, saving cost and improving equipment reliability. We combine our hardware technology with data computing by developing machine learning capabilities to utilise the big data generated from our hardware. This offers customers real-time continuous monitoring, early problem diagnosis, rapid decision making, enhanced efficiency and cost savings.
To date we have received various levels of funding to demonstrate the technology with laboratory based prototypes. Nonetheless, this project seeks to build on this and develop a field demonstrator to engage project owners and OEMs in field trials and in the reality of the value our technology can provide. This technology will enable us to solve the hard-to-reach and hard-to-sense challenges of the wind sector, using the data we generate intelligently and innovatively to forward model turbine behaviour and immerse businesses in industry 4.0\. We advance evolution of maintenance strategies to secure equipment reliability, increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and by extension reliability of turbines. This can reduce the need for physical intervention on turbines and effectively lower O&M costs. This will potentially reduce electricity costs from offshore wind, making offshore wind more competitive with other sources of electricity and ripple in effect to our electricity bills."
The automation of industrial practices to enable greater productivity on production floors is driving the need to replace conventional processes. One of such processes is the use of conventional laboratories to determine the rate of wear and degradation of lubricated production floor machinery. The inefficiency of this process results in reactive maintenance strategies where machinery is maintained only after it has broken-down thus reducing machine availability and productivity. Another is carrying out maintenance when there is no need for this as is the case with preventative maintenance strategies, making maintenance of machinery unnecessarily expensive. Diagnosing early, potential failure of heavy machinery is critical to operations across many industries. For this reason, industrial businesses in 2016 spent £2.01bn on state-of-the-art Oil Condition Monitoring (OCM) techniques. These techniques however, are inefficient, expensive and environmentally unfriendly, for example, costing additional £2.1bn in breakdowns, repairs and downtime losses. RAB-Microfluidics has developed cutting edge microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology to deliver real-time continuous testing and analysis of lubricating oil. Our "Lab-on-a-Chip" technology delivers oil analysis 1000x faster and 10x cheaper than the current "send the sample to the Laboratory" approach. Analysis of contaminants in engine oil, drive trains etc. is a well-established method of detecting problems. This procedure is called Oil Condition Monitoring. We deliver this onsite, in real time, saving cost and improving equipment reliability. We combine our hardware technology with data computing by developing machine learning capabilities to utilise the data generated from our hardware. This offers customers real-time continuous monitoring, early problem diagnosis, rapid decision making, enhanced efficiency and cost savings. To date we have received various levels of funding to demonstrate the technology with laboratory based prototypes. Nonetheless, this project seeks to build on this and develop a field demonstrator to engage businesses in the manufacturing space in field trials and in the reality of the value our technology can provide. This technology will enable us to solve the hard-to-reach and hard-to-sense challenges of many business in the manufacturing space, using the data we generate intelligently and innovatively to forward model machinery behaviour and immerse businesses in industry 4.0\. We advance evolution of maintenance strategies to secure equipment reliability, increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and by extension productivity on production floors. We extend our capabilities to other industries such as transportation, power generation, maritime etc. helping to transition businesses in these industries to predictive maintenance strategies.
This project will develop a novel wind turbine blade structural health monitoring system based on digital
cameras and image processing using an array of optical markers installed inside the blade. An optical system
will be designed, and a digital image correlation technique will be used to track the markers which will
characterise the dynamics of the blade during operation for both onshore and offshore wind turbines. The
output data will be used to characterise the blade structural condition by monitoring changes in properties in
real time in all weather and all operational conditions. For the feasibility study the layout of camera,
illumination and markers will be optimised for a real blade using the design geometry and structural properties
and proven in a state-of-the-art 7MW wind turbine
Low cost Hyperspectral Crop Camera (HCC).
A consortium from a broad range of disciplines have come together to develop a revolutionary low cost crop camera that could potentially allow farmers to improve crop yield, use less fertiliser, use less pesticide and spot pests and diseases earlier.
The project will be led and coordinated by Wideblue Limited - a developer and manufacturer of specialist cameras. The project will also call on the skills of the the James Hutton Institutes expertise in
crop nutrition and monitoring, the University of Strathclyde's Hyperspectral Imaging Centre, the University of the West of Scotland's Institute of Thin Films, Sensors and Imaging and Galloway & MacLeod's intelligent agriculture division.
This collaborative R&D project follows on from the successful “Mosaicing for Automatic Pipe Scanning (MAPS)” TSB Feasibility Study that confirmed the feasibility of a novel approach to combining optical hardware and advanced image processing techniques for interactive 3D remote visual inspection (RVI) of pipe work in the nuclear industry. The project aims to progress from this feasibility study to a ruggedized prototype which will be deployed and demonstrated in a range of test environments, both in the laboratory and on-site. The five member consortium includes Inspectahire (INS), University of Strathclyde (UoS), Wideblue Ltd and a nuclear site licence company and is led by National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL). The specification of the hardware will be driven by the supply chain companies (NNL and INS) and the nuclear site license company (SL), to meet both their existing needs and the emerging opportunities associated with reactor lifetime extension and new build programmes both in the UK and overseas. The combination of skills within the consortium is unique, and as such this proposal represents a unique opportunity to develop a world leading capability for nuclear inspection.
Respiration rate and exhaled carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations are known to be key measures in the evaluation of patient health trends in both routine healthcare and emergency healthcare. However routine and reliable measurement of respiration rate is notoriously difficult to do. It is prone to false readings, outside influences and is therefore not considered reliable. Previous attempts have included the use of motion sensors, flow measurements or use expensive IR lasers and are prone to ergonomics concerns with product costs too high for widespread adoption and routine use. This project aims to develop a low cost respiration rate monitor & capnometer,based on patented non-dispersive infrared fast response infrared sensor, sensing exhaled carbon dioxide and to trial demonstrators in various clinical settings. This project aims to use unique patented low cost solid state mid-infrared light emitting diode/ photodiode detector combination and an optical waveguide to measure rates of exhaled CO2.
The project involves a consortium of Wideblue Ltd, Gas Sensing Solutions Ltd and Cambridge Respiratory Innovations Ltd.