Process Engineering

Mine-infested land can now be rendered safe by a new tractor that crushes unexploded bombs.

Unexploded anti-personnel landmines litter the border between Croatia and what was once Yugoslavia. The mine-infested area spans more or less half of the country and roughly 1,700 km2 of minefields are left to clear.

EUREKA’s first foray into anti-personnel landmine technology, the ORACLE project has developed a rugged tractor for clearing mines and unexploded shells from agricu

Today there are evermore intelligent objects, i.e., more devices that adapt to our needs. For example, there is intelligent clothing, intelligent computers, and intelligent household devices such as washing machines, music centres, lamps, and so on.

In fact, it is currently possible for a sensor at the entrance to a dwelling to recognise the voice or the odour of the owner and simultaneously open the door. It is also possible, on entering the house and depending on the mood or physical state

Pioneering research carried out by Kingston University is helping to pave the way for a manned mission to Mars. A project team based at the University’s School of Engineering has developed a robotic micro-rover to travel the Martian surface to find out whether humans could live in the Red Planet’s hostile environment.

Named Endurance, the small self-propelled vehicle will be powered by the sun’s rays and equipped to drill beneath the surface to find out if life exists on Mars in the form of

A novel method for the design and manufacture of sensors to measure the temperature and relative humidity of the air, the pH of solutions or the refractive index of liquids based on optic fibre has been devised at the Public University of Navarre.

The sensors are small devices capable of capturing both physical and chemical signals from the surrounding environment and converting them into electrical signals for their subsequent processing. The information thus transformed can be easi

Laying water mains has always been a time-consuming job. Each section must be laid, joints welded, the interior checked for heat damage, and any damage repaired. Then the whole thing has to be encased in concrete if the ground is uneven. Now EUREKA project DRIVE-LOCK is about to make the process quicker and cheaper.

The French and Swiss partners in the DRIVE-LOCK project have developed a new conical interlocking system that joins steel water pipes together quickly and combines the strength o

Technology has moved beyond wireless and pocketable to wearable. Clothes and accessories can serve a wider range of purposes than we’re currently accustomed to. Wearable technology produced by a Finnish smart clothing R&D center and its partners is selling well.

The smart clothing and wearable technology concepts are based on a permanent integration of clothing and technology. Clothes can be made ‘smart’ by adding intelligent features such as information technology and by using special fibre