ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Imagine lighter and more fuel economic cars with improved crashworthiness that help save lives, aircrafts and wind-turbine blades with significant weight reductions that lead to large savings in material costs and environmental impact, and light but efficient armour that helps to protect against potentially deadly blasts. These are the future perspectives with a new generation of advanced structures and micro-structured materials. The goal of INNODYN is to bring current design procedures for structures and materials a significant step forward by developing new efficient procedures for integrated analysis and design taking the nonlinear dynamic performance into account. The assessment of nonlinear dynamic effects is essential for fully exploiting the vast potentials of structural and material capabilities, but a focused endeavour is strongly required to develop the methodology required to reach the ambitious goals. INNODYN will in two interacting work-packages develop the necessary computational analysis and design tools using 1) reduced-order models (WP1) that enable optimization of the overall topology of structures which is today hindered by excessive computational costs when dealing with nonlinear dynamic systems 2) multi-scale models (WP2) that facilitates topological design of the material microstructure including essential nonlinear geometrical effects currently not included in state-of-the-art methods. The work will be carried out by a research group with two PhD-students and a postdoc, led by a PI with a track-record for original ground-breaking research in analysis and optimization of linear and nonlinear dynamics and hosted by one of the world's leading research groups on topology optimization, the TOPOPT group at the Technical University of Denmark.

823 992 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2016-01-31

This project studies the topic of human consciousness from a multidisciplinary perspective. Human consciousness can be defined as the inner subjective experience of mental states such as perceptions, judgments, thoughts, intentions to act, feelings or desires. These experiences are to be described from a subjective, phenomenal first-person account. On the other hand, cognitive neurosciences explore the neural correlates with respect to brain topology and brain dynamics from an objective third-person account. Despite a great interest in consciousness among cognitive neuroscientists, there are yet no general agreement on definitions or models, and no attempts to draw conclusions from the existing body of work to make progress in the treatment of patients. While it is generally the case that research in cognitive neuroscience has a minimal influence on clinical work in neurorehabilitation, this is very much the case in consciousness studies. Here, so far, there is no direct connection to clinical practice MindRehab will make use of an integrated approach to find new ways to understand cognitive dysfunctions and to actually rehabilitate patients with cognitive problems after brain injury. This integrated approach, using consciousness studies to create progress in a clinical area, is novel and does not exist as an explicit goal for any other research group in the world. The objective of MindRehab is to integrate three aspects: Philosophy and basic research on consciousness, and clinical work in neurorehabilitation. Furthermore, the objective is to realize a number of research projects leading to novel contributions at the frontier of all three domains. However, contrary to all other current research projects in this field, the emphasis is put on the latter the clinical work.

1 641 232 €

Start date: 2010-06-01, End date: 2015-05-31

Several sophisticated image processing circuits have been discovered in the animal retina, many of which manifest massive neural synchrony. A major insight is that this type of synchrony often translates to high-frequency activity on a macroscopic level, but electroretinography (ERG) has not been tapped to examine this potential in humans. Bolstered by our compelling results combining ERG with magnetoencephalography (MEG), this project will address several open questions with respect to human visual processing: 1) Could variable retinal timing be linked to intrinsic image properties and pass on phase variance downstream to visual cortex? Our data suggests the retina responds to moving gratings and natural imagery with non-phase-locked high gamma oscillations (>65 Hz) just like visual cortex, and that slower ERG potentials exhibit strong phase-locking within stimuli but large phase variance across stimuli. 2) Do such retinal gamma band responses, both evoked and induced, directly drive some cortical gamma responses? Pilot data suggests that it can, through retinocortical coherence, our novel ERG-MEG mapping technique. 3) Several kinds of motion have now been shown to elicit massive synchrony in mammalian retina circuits. Does this also result in macroscopic high-frequency activity? If so, our experiments will finally reveal and characterize motion detection by the human retina. 4) Do efferent pathways to the retina exist in humans? We discovered that the ERG exhibits eyes-closed alpha waves strikingly similar to the classic EEG phenomenon and, leveraging our retinocortical coherence technique, that this activity is likely driven by contralateral occipital cortex. Then, can retinal responses be influenced by ongoing cortical activity? Characterizing retinocortical interaction represents a complete paradigm shift that will be imperative for our understanding of neural synchrony in the human nervous system and enable several groundbreaking new avenues for research.

1 499 850 €

Start date: 2016-03-01, End date: 2021-02-28

Turbulence is at a crossroads: The old, established ideas of Richardson and Kolmogorov have with accumulating evidence come under renewed scrutiny, especially in non-stationary and non-equilibrium flows. Many in the community seek new and more accurate ways to describe turbulence. This is a time of re-evaluation and opportunity! The assumed statistical equilibrium of the smallest and intermediate scales is identified as the main cause of the potentially erroneous deductions. This problem was not previously noticed because experiments that confirmed the previous theories were all in statistical equilibrium. And those experiments and theories which disagreed were labelled ‘anomalous’, no matter how carefully performed or argued. The proposed theory-intensive approach will therefore specifically use non-equilibrium and statistically non-stationary flows to: 1. Investigate the underlying mechanisms determining the level of dissipation 2. Quantify the resulting effects on the balance equations of central importance 3. Test the results against the established, as well as competing, theories I will use stationary and accelerating jets well-suited for studying the non-linear interactions and quantifying departures to the assumed equilibrium and the non-stationary dissipation. The feasibility is demonstrated with preliminary results. The databases which will be established should contribute substantially to settling the long-lived ultimate question of turbulence: what are the true underlying mechanisms that set the level of dissipation. The results will be ground breaking scientifically and economically. The impact for engineering applications is extensive, since Kolmogorov-based turbulence models are routinely used, and since developing flows constitute the rule rather than the exception in the majority of engineering applications. The potential economic consequences for e.g. transportation, climate predictions and power extraction are impossible to underestimate.

1 499 036 €

Start date: 2019-04-01, End date: 2024-03-31