Luxembourg National Research Fund

With the current climate warming, the loss of biodiversity as well as the pollution of the world’s oceans by plastic, the understanding that the current way of life can no longer be continued in this way is increasing. One proposed solution that is currently much discussed is the concept of a circular economy (CE). This represents the opposite of the current model, the linear economy, where materials are taken from the earth, products are manufactured, and then thrown away as ‘waste’. The CE concept now aims to make us forget the idea of ‘waste’ as such, and in its place to return these valuable resources to the individual material flows (e.g., remanufacture, recycle, etc.). This can be summarized with the following three goals:

1) Eliminate waste and pollution,
2) Circulate products and materials (at their highest value),
3) Regenerate nature.
It is underpinned by a transition to renewable energy and materials. A circular economy decouples economic activity from the consumption of finite resources and is a resilient system that is good for business, people, and the environment.

When a new electronic device is to be launched on the British and European market, it is common that the local conditions, in this case the different plug connections, are taken into account in the product design. Now, if the goal in implementing the CE concept is to increase material return, the same consideration should actually apply. This would require that the local end-of-life (EOL) process requirements and specifications be considered during product design.

However, it is precisely at this interface that no suitable solution to implement CE is available on the market today. Our proposed solution is therefore now aimed at analyzing the individual EOL processes, mapping them virtually, and making the know-how gained available to product designers in the form of a simulation tool. In this way, the tool enables product designers to check their products regarding alignment with the locally existing EOL conditions and to adapt them if necessary. The advantage is that the necessary information does not have to be laboriously collected but is made available within the tool, together with information regarding potential penalties for non-compliance with legal requirements. In a first step, this will be offered for the packaging market and more specifically the PET bottle, then later extended to other product groups.

SVALINN protects digital assets — like image, audio, video, text, and tabular data — from various misuses including secret disclosure, tampering, social engineering, copyright infringement and fake content generation. SVALINN relies on AI technologies to produce invisible signatures ensuring asset authenticity and impeding misuses by both humans and automated tools.

SHARCS is a technology that allows to turn modern processors, which are very susceptible the ionizing radiation effects, into robust ones, which at the same time offer state-of-the-art power efficiency and very high processing performance. It will help in building more capable and more cost-effective satellites and probes by removing the reliance on legacy, radiation-hardened semiconductor technologies.

Innovation in healthcare is advancing at an unprecedented pace with exponential growth in the number of scientific publications annually. Stakeholders engaged in healthcare provision, including regulatory agencies, require objective, systematic and reproducible synthesis of available evidence to make the best decisions for patients and public health . The ability to rapidly identify quality evidence is becoming more challenging, however.

Papyrus leverages data visualization using natural language processing. It allows stakeholders to rapidly interrogate the research corpus on their chosen topic. At a glance, it provides them with accurate, reliable, transparent, quantitative information on the distribution of the evidence-base within, leading to gains in efficiency, time and money.

NBenefit$ 3.0 is a user-friendly software tool that can support the work of urban planners and professionals in the field of Built Environment. This solution can support the sustainable design of nature-based solution (NBS) projects in cities (such as the implementation of urban forests, wetlands and ponds, green roofs, vegetated filter slips, and urban scrublands), by forecasting the costs (for who is investing in NBS) and benefits (for citizens/local communities and the natural environment) of planting trees and shrubs in urban settings. In so doing it predicts, for example, how much carbon can be stored over time by plants in a certain area of the city, or how much pollutants those plants can remove from the air. The tool then translates the physical value of the NBS ecosystem services into monetary values and compares them with the life cycle costs of the NBS project, including their externalities. As a final output, the monetisation of environmental impacts integrated with financial costs and externalities in the NBenefit$ 3.0 balance provides a unique, straightforward, and spatially explicit value of the economic performance of the NBS over all its life cycle phases. From a societal perspective, this process helps to identify when a break-even point occurs over the NBS lifetime, and therefore when net benefits are starting to be generated, as well as when different scenarios established by the user will reach similar levels of net benefits. Whereas from a governance perspective, this information is key to assist urban decision-makers in making sustainable choices on urban planning and landscape design.

Proteins are known as vital components of the human and animal diet but these sophisticated molecules can also serve as therapeutic agents or find uses in many applications as functional components in a range of products -from food ingredients to washing powders. This is because proteins can exert a variety of functions in living organisms but also in industrialized products. However, proteins are labile and they have to be obtained from microorganisms or other types of cells or pants. The recovery of proteins from the mentioned matrices is challenging due to loss in product mass and product functionality or activity. Special processes are need to that end. In this project we propose a novel technology that can recover fully functional proteins from complex mixtures in high yields, securing their final application. The technology minimizes environmental impact by reducing water and energy consumption and avoiding the use of harsh chemicals. The technology can help achieving the transition from animal-based protein nutrition into a plant-based or “non-cruel” based source of nutritious protein.

Bacterial infection is regarded as the most severe and devastating complication associated to the use of biomaterials with important social, clinical and economic impacts. In the field of dental implants, peri-implantitis is the main biological failure, of bacterial origin, coming after a successful implantation. While initial osteointegration is now well mastered and documented, the occurrence of peri-implantitis after implantation still a field in development. In fact, supra-implant dental prosthetic structures could be key on preventing bacterial infection if they could assure a long-lasting sealing of the gingival tissue and be resistant to the formation of biofilm.

BioIMPACT project aims at the development of super-implant dental structures with anti-biofilm properties as a marketable solution to prevent or to manage and heal peri-implantitis.