The University of Bath is part of this internationally collaborative project which has received €3.8m of funding from the European Innovation Training Network.
The TOMOCON (Smart Tomographic Sensors for Advanced Industrial Process Control) project will last three years and bring together the expertise of 12 research institutions from across the UK, Germany, France, Holland, Sweden and Poland with 15 renowned industrial companies including Shell, Total, Tata Steel, Siemens and DuPont.
The project team will look to bring advanced automation and control into the production process line by developing and testing smart real-time tomography sensors as part of industrial processes on lab and pilot-scale applications.
In doing so, this technology will provide gross energy savings, improved product quality, enhanced process safety, higher flexibility of production and will consequently strengthen the competitiveness of the European industries.
A significant gap currently in the process industries is existing sensors are only able to obtain one single local parameter such as temperature, pressure, filling level, flow rate or species concentration. As a result, these measurements are often unrepresentative of the whole process signalling a need for distributed sensor networks as well as field-measuring and imaging sensors.
Professor Manuch Soleimani from the University of Bath’s Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering and the UK lead for TOMOCON, said: “It is a great opportunity for us to be a major partner in such an exciting network involving world leaders in their academic fields as well as some of the best known multinational industrial partners.”