"Marine Sensors & Communications for the Marine Environment"
Research Measure: Discovery Research Measure
Funding Type: Beaufort Awards
Funding Year: 2007
Project Duration: 7 Years
Project Type: Capacity Building
Total Grant-Aid: €2.48m
Research Group:
- National Centre for Sensor Research, Dublin City University
Project Summary
The National Centre for Sensor Research will focus on the development of bio-sensing platforms for targets like microbes, parasites, pathogens and toxins as at present, despite significant capabilities in related areas, there is no national research leader or team specialising in this difficult issue. The lack of low cost, self-sustaining platforms for monitoring these targets means that measurements are done primarily through grab sampling at a limited number of places and time, followed by analysis back at a centralised facility. The resulting huge gaps in our knowledge of water quality means that when a major event occurs, there is dispute about where the pollution is coming from and two is to blame. The NCSR aim to rollout platforms capable of remote sampling and analysis over extended periods of time and to ultimately produce the building blocks of an 'environmental nervous system' comprised of many distributed sensing devices that share their data in real time on the web, enabling the source of pollution events to be quickly located and remedial action initiated rapidly to minimise the danger to people and contamination of distribution systems.
Key Objectives
- Define mechanisms in marine and riverine environments - temporal & spatial variability in fouling events;
- Develop micro-separation science technologies for application within micro-fluidic platforms, and their future application to the simultaneous separation of multiple target species within marine samples;
- Develop, test, deploy and then evaluate the effectiveness of a sensor network based on visual sensing of some aspect of the coastal marine environment;
- Design, construct and test a fluorescence-based microbial sensor for incorporation in autonomous field-deployable platform;
- Develop genetically engineered, highly stable and specific biorecognition ligands for detection of contaminants; and
- Design and develop microfluidics manifold and autonomous instrument for handling and analysis biosamples in the field.
Further details on the Work Package (PDF, 352KB) are available.