ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Li-ion battery is ubiquitous and has emerged as the major contender to power electric vehicles, yet Li-ion is slowly but surely reaching its limits and controversial debates on lithium supply cannot be ignored. New sustainable battery chemistries must be developed and the most appealing alternatives are to use Ca or Mg metal anodes which would bring a breakthrough in terms of energy density relying on much more abundant elements. Since Mg and Ca do not appear to be plagued by dendrite formation like Li, metal anodes could thus safely be used. While standard electrolytes forming stable passivation layers at the electrode/electrolyte interfaces enabled the success of the Li-ion technology, the migration of divalent cations through a passivation layer was thought to be impossible. Thus, all research efforts to date have been devoted to the formulation of electrolytes that do not form such layer. This approach comes with complex electrolyte, highly corrosive and with narrow electrochemical stability window leading to incompatibility with high voltage cathodes thus penalizing energy density. The applicant demonstrated that calcium can be reversibly plated and stripped through a stable passivation layer when transport properties within the electrolyte are tuned (decreasing ion pair formation). CAMBAT aims at developing new electrolytes forming stable passivation layers and allowing the migration of Ca2+ and Mg2+. Such a dramatic shift in the methodology would allow considering a completely new family of electrolytes enabling the evaluation of high voltage cathode materials that cannot be tested in the electrolytes available nowadays. 1Ah prototype cells will be assembled as proof of concept, targets for energy density and cost being ca. 300 Wh/kg and 250 $/kWh, respectively, thus doubling the energy density while dividing by at least a factor of 2 the price when compared to state of the art Li-ion batteries and having the potential for being SAFER (absence of dendrite).

1 688 705 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

The household and family structure in every major industrialized country changed in a fundamental way during the last couple of decades. First, marriage is less important today, as divorce, cohabitation, and single-motherhood are much more common. Second, female labor force participation has increased dramatically. As a result of these changes, today s households are very far from traditional breadwinner husband and housekeeper wife paradigm. These dramatic changes generated significant public interest and a large body of literature that tries to understand causes and consequences of these changes. This project has two main goals. First, it studies changes in household and family structure. The particular questions that it tries to answer are: 1) What are economic factors behind the rise in premarital sex and its destigmatization? What determines parents incentives to socialize their children and affect their attitudes? 2) What are the causes and consequences of the recent rise in assortative mating and diverging marriage patterns by different educational groups? 3) Why are marriage patterns among blacks so different than whites in the U.S.? The second aim of this project is to improve our understanding of income risk, the role of social insurance policies and labor market dynamics by building models that explicitly considers two-earner households. In particular, we ask the following set of questions: 1) What is the role of social insurance policies (income maintenance programs or progressive taxation) in an economy populated by two-earner households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic risk? 2) How does marriage and labor market dynamics interact and how important this interaction for our understanding of labor supply and marriage decisions?

1 037 000 €

Start date: 2010-11-01, End date: 2015-10-31

The simulation of multidisciplinary applications use very often a combination of heterogeneous and disjoint numerical techniques that are hard to put together by the user, and whose mathematical foundation is obscure. An example of this situation is the numerical modeling of the physical processes taking place in nuclear fusion reactors. This problem, which can be modeled by a set of partial differential equations, is extremely challenging. It involves (essentially) fluid mechanics, electromagnetics, thermal radiation and neutronics. The most common numerical approaches to each of these problems separately are very different and their coupling is a hard and inefficient task. Our main objective in this proposal is to develop and analyze a unified numerical framework based on stabilized finite element methods based on multi-scale decompositions capable to simulate all the physical processes taking place in nuclear fusion technology. The project aims at giving a substantial contribution to the numerical approximation of every physical process as well as efficient coupling techniques for the multiphysics problems. The development of the numerical formulations we propose and their application require mastering different physics, designing numerical approximations for these different physical problems, analyzing mathematically the resulting methods, implementing them in an efficient way in parallel platforms and understanding the results and drawing conclusions, both from a physical and from an engineering perspective. Advanced research in physical modeling, numerical approximations, mathematical analysis and computer implementation are the keys to meeting these objectives. The successful implementation of the project will provide advanced numerical techniques for the simulation of the processes taking place in a fusion reactor. A deliverable product of the project will be a unified finite element software package that will be an extremely valuable tool.

1 320 000 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2015-12-31

Insulin secretion and insulin action are critical for normal glucose homeostasis. Defects in both of these processes lead to type 2 diabetes (T2D). Unravelling the mechanisms that lead to T2D is fundamental in the search of new molecular drugs to prevent and control this disease. Organ-on-a-chip devices offer new approaches for T2D disease modelling and drug discovery by providing biologically relevant models of tissues and organs in vitro integrated with biosensors. As such, organ-on-a-chip devices have the potential to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry by enabling reliable and high predictive in vitro testing of drug candidates. The capability to miniaturize biosensor systems and advanced tissue fabrication procedures have enabled researchers to create multiple tissues on a chip with a high degree of control over experimental variables for high-content screening applications. The goal of this project is the fabrication of a biomimetic multi organ-on-a-chip integrated device composed of skeletal muscle and pancreatic islets for studying metabolism glucose diseases and for drug screening applications. Engineered muscle tissues and pancreatic islets are integrated with the technology to detect the glucose consumption, contraction induced glucose metabolism, insulin secretion and protein biomarker secretion of cells. We aim to design a novel therapeutic tool to test drugs with a multi organ-on-a-chip device. Such finding would improve drug test approaches and would provide for new therapies to prevent the loss of beta cell mass associated with T2D and defects in the glucose uptake in skeletal muscle.

1 499 554 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31