2016 Archive
- New Microneedle Platform Technology
- 5th UK & Ireland FOAM/OpenFOAM User Day
- Science Apprentice
- Neograft Teams with CÚRAM Research Group
- Ciara Giles Doran won a silver medal at SSRA16
- Fengzhou Fang
- Dr Peter Theobald will present research on novel material structures
- Image Guided Navigation in Airways - Monday 18th April, 1pm, room 204
- MME PhD takes pride of place in UCD's Women's GAA
- Traumatic Brain Injury seminar - Monday 7th March, room 204
- Industrial giant Bekaert launches University Technology Centre in UCD
- Engineers Journal to run series of articles from UCD
- 5th year student braves dragons on Hackathon winning team
- PhD student, Kevin Doherty, wins the IOM3 World Lecture Competition.
- UCD students win ESB Engineering Challenge…again!
- UCD getting ready for launch – MASER 13 rocket featured on SSW
- Presenting in the Dragon’s Den – Barry Brophy meets Bobby Kerr
- UCD to take lead on European Space Agency project
- Biomedical Engineering awarded EU funding for diabetes research.
UCD to take lead on European Space Agency project – October ‘15 launch
Monday, 22 August, 2016
A research group led by Dr David Browne will be the coordinator on a European Space Agency (ESA) project. Solidification experiments will be conducted on an unmanned rocket launching from Sweden this October.
XRMON is an ESA sponsored multidisciplinary international collaboration investigating the effects of gravity on aluminium-based alloy solidification using real-time in situ X-radiography. UCD (PI: Dr. David J. Browne, postdoc Dr Andrew G. Murphy) has been chosen by ESA to lead the XRMON consortium until 2018.
All metal solidification (casting) processes are subject to the effects of gravity. Modelling these processes is difficult because gravity cannot be controlled anywhere on earth. By conducting experiments in microgravity conditions, however, a greater understanding of the effect of gravity on solidification can be gained.
Solidification experiments have already been performed under short duration microgravity conditions by the UCD team on parobolic flights, but each such experiment can only last about 20 seconds. UCD will next launch a similar experiment on and ESA sounding rocket, on board which 6 minutes of zero gravity is available for solidification of the alloy. Eventually such experiments will be conducted on the International Space Station.
UCD has designed and developed a dedicated isothermal furnace (XRMON-SOL) for the forthcoming experiments. The sounding rocket launch date is scheduled for mid-October, 2015, from Kiruna, Sweden. This is the first time an Irish scientific team has been asked by ESA to lead such a Microgravity Applications Promotion (MAP) project.