This project is focused on the design and development of new rotor field excitation methods to achieve brushless operation for wound-field electrical machines (EMs). The proposed method will provide an opportunity to reduce the reliance of EMs on rare-earth materials of which EU is lacking its resources and eliminate the usage of brushes for their rotor field excitation while improving the reliability and cost-efficiency of the machine systems. Through this method, a new armature winding configuration will be developed to generate not only the fundamental magnetomotive force (MMF) but also a suitable harmonic MMF component in the airgap of the EMs, while powered from a single customary current-controlled voltage source inverter (VSI). The rotor of these machines will be altered to house both harmonic and field windings. The harmonic MMF component will be employed to induce a harmonic current in the harmonic winding of the rotor, which will be rectified to excite the rotor field winding to achieve brushless operation and develop torque. A new topology optimization methodology will be developed to optimize the windings and minimize copper consumption. The EMs employing HARMFIX do not require rare-earth materials, costly auxiliary electromechanical excitation systems or custom-made power electronics circuitry, or control strategies for their brushless operation. Therefore, this method is a truly viable and sustainable alternative for commercial products which are currently employing rare-earth materials, brushless exciters or brushes, and slip rings.

We strongly believe in economic yet effective healthcare options. The wound dressing materials in this regard require significant research. Herein we aim to develop economic yet effective wound healing and tissue regeneration material. The proposed IonoFoldS will consist of ionic liquids and biopolymers made using a microfluidic device. The proposed microfluidic device will be scalable and hence will allow bulk industrial production. The constructed IonoFoldS can work as both tissue regeneration as well as wound healing material.

The future world imagined by the circular economic model is a world without waste, provided that materials and energy circulate efficiently enough through society. The project WasteMatters disrupts the waste-as-resource paradigm prevalent in the circular economy related politics, business, and scholarship alike, and examines our contemporary trashscapes beyond the idea(l) of the eternal redemption of waste. Its novel approach is to analyse the leaky realities of waste as integral to the human condition and as constitutive of society. The project explores the implications of waste throughout society and what waste does for/to us; what kind of relations, agencies, and spatiotemporal scales it assumes, prompts, enacts, and sustains; to what kind of futures society commits itself with it; and what humans become with waste. The project develops a new methodology, more-than-human ethnography, to be able to attend to the vibrant nature and active role of waste in how we live together. The research will be carried out through four sub-studies across various sites (in Sweden and Finland), which function as important nodal points in the management and circulation of wastes: households, businesses, biogas plants, waste incinerators, and a nuclear waste repository and, to attend to the multiplicity of waste, the project will focus on four kinds of waste: food waste, plastic waste, waste incineration ash, and nuclear waste. Through the research design, the project will generate ground-breaking insight into waste as both constitutive of society and as something that disturbs it. The empirical, methodological, and conceptual insights will be combined to enable a leap in theory building to develop a new relational theory of waste that pays attention to the multiple spatiotemporal scales of society and human actions, ultimately leading to a paradigm change from the circular economy to waste matter society.

WHAT: MULTIMODAL will develop sensory-motorized material systems that perceive several coupled environmental stimuli and respond to a combination of these via controlled motor functions, shape-change or locomotion. The sensory-motorized materials will be “trained” to strengthen upon repetitive action, they can “heal” upon injury, and mechanically adapt to different environments. They will be utilized in the design of soft robots with autonomous and interactive functions. HOW: We will utilize shape-changing liquid crystal networks (LCNs) that undergo controlled untethered motions in response to photochemical, (photo)thermal, and humidity-triggered activation. Coupling between these stimuli will allow for gated control strategies over the shape changes. I expect that the gated control strategies, in combination with stimuli-induced diffusion from surface to bulk of the LCN, will enable advanced robotic functionalities. The diffusion process will be used for supramolecular crosslinking and formation of interpenetrated dynamic polymer networks with the LCN, to allow for trainable gaiting for versatile locomotion control. We will also make mechanically adaptable amphibious grippers for autonomous object recognition. WHY: Technological disruptions are often due to new materials and fabrication technologies. Paradigm changes on how materials are perceived have profound effects on our society, well-being, and the ways we see the world. Here, we strive for a paradigm change in robotic materials. By taking inspiration from biological sensory-motor interactions, we will develop MULTIMODAL materials with autonomous and interactive features. These features go far beyond the capabilities of conventional stimuli-responsive materials, allowing us to take inanimate, shape-changing materials one ambitious step closer to motor functions of living species.

Accurate time interval measurement and synchronization between two or more pulses are highly desirable in different fields of science and technology. Electronic components-based approaches can not measure the time difference between two events precisely below two-digit picosecond scale. Additionally, the use of highly expensive electronic components and temperature increase due to the heat generated within the system are other drawbacks, limiting its long-term use and performance. To address these issues, we propose to develop a novel, extremely high precision, low energy, all-optical timekeeping methodology and Timekeeper device with epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) metamaterials. Besides timekeeping, the technologies developed in this project can also become a powerful toolbox or an optical metamaterials technology platform, contributing to the creation of low-cost, accurate, practically light-based computing processes in future devices. Our work will have substantial implications on various areas of science and technology, including time and frequency metrology, geodesy, and astronomy. The developed all-optical time interpolation will enable extremely high precision of time events up to femtosecond scale using ultra-low power and exclude the high-speed electronics and high-temperature complications. The project results will apply novel metasurface-enhanced epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials to realize all-optical time-to-frequency converters and optical switches that can be used to realize low-cost, high-resolution (femtosecond) time-interval counters and optical gates.