Transnational R&D funding

The Technology Strategy Board is to invest nearly £4m in 18 British small and medium-sized enterprises to help facilitate research-and-development ties with partners across Europe.

The Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is to invest nearly £4m in 18 British small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help facilitate research-and-development (R&D) ties with partners across

Europe

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The British companies will link with partners from 17 different European countries to undertake R&D in areas including biotechnology and healthcare, transport, energy and electronics.

Graham Mobbs, European operations manager at the TSB, said: ‘The Eurostars programme is the first European funding and support programme to be specifically dedicated to small and medium-sized companies. It seeks to overcome one of the major barriers to high-quality transnational research and development led by SMEs – the lack of guaranteed public-sector funding.’

One of the projects to be funded through the Eurostars programme is Maritime Carbon Capture and Storage (Maritime CCS), in which the UK partner is London-based Process Systems Enterprise.

The TSB will invest more than £300,000 in this project, which is aimed at developing and screening alternative designs for carbon capture and storage (CCS) on board ships in transit, investigating the chemical capture of CO2 and its temporary storage until discharge at a port.

The TILACSys (Through-Ice Location and Communication System) is a Eurostars project that will see Wireless Fibre Systems partner a Norwegian company.

The project, which is to receive nearly £450,000 of TSB investment, will involve the development of a wireless system capable of locating and communicating with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).

According to the TSB, TILACSys will enable a surface vessel, helicopter or unmanned aerial vehicle to communicate with the AUV through the ice. The system is said to offer major benefits to polar operations in the environmental, oil-and-gas and security sectors.