Air pollution is a major risk factor for health in Europe. EU-funded research is helping to find innovative, inexpensive and green solutions for improving air quality, particularly in urban environments.

 

The innovative use of collaboration and digital engineering tools to protect London’s water supply by a Cork-based engineering company, and a project born to life in Galway to reduce its customers’ carbon footprint by one gigaton within 10 years, are among the six projects that scooped awards in the Engineering Excellence Digital Series. 

For Stephan Borrmann, a day of high altitude detective work begins early. He wakes at about 5.30am in a hotel in the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal. After a quick breakfast, he and his team are driven to the city’s airport. Their job is to prepare a converted Russian espionage plane so that it can investigate one of the biggest mysteries of the atmosphere.

They might be beautiful at times, but clouds are still one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in understanding how the climate will change due to global warming, explains Professor Pier Siebesma, an atmospheric physicist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands

Engineers have made their initial design more practical, efficient, and scalable.

Runners-up for the 2020 SIESO medal Agnes Aparte and Aditi Holey review cases of Legionella outbreaks, how the disease can be spread and the implications for industry dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.