Volker Hessel, Professor of Micro Flow Chemistry and Process Technology, calls the FET Open subsidies the ‘ERC Advanced Grants for groups’. “As only 20 of the 547 proposals were allocated funding, I am very pleased with this outcome. Ben Feringa has just won the Nobel Prize for nano-machines; what we want to produce are micro-machines.”

In the chemicals industry new substances - such as medicines - are often produced in several steps that take place sequentially under differing conditions. Nature makes similar substances in a completely different way, by having all the processes occur in the same cell, with each step automatically leading to the next. The idea behind ONE-FLOW, in which the new TU/e professor Jan van Hest (Biomedical Engineering) is also participating, is to use the benefits of these natural processes and combine them with sophisticated continuous reactor technology.

In time, this should result in new and cheaper medicines, while it also offers scope for personalized medicine. This project will involve the TU/e employees collaborating with colleagues in Delft, Austria, Germany, France and Great Britain.

The leadership of the other project, SiLAS, is in the hands of Jos Haverkort and his colleague Erik Bakkers from the group Photonics and Semiconductor Nanophysics. Their proposal involves developing a new type of silicon with a hexagonal crystal structure, with the aim of creating a semiconductor from which not only electrical transistors, but also nano-lasers can be made.

This will make it much easier to combine optical and electronic functions on a single chip. The use of optical (light-based) technology is necessary to make a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient computers and related equipment. As well as with colleagues from universities in Great Britain (Oxford), Germany and Austria, Haverkort and Bakkers will also be working on this project with IBM Research in Switzerland.

For each of these projects, the European Union is making available four million euros. The Eindhoven partners will each receive roughly 1.25 million of this funding.