Project description
Improved water quality monitoring for aquaculture
Industrial wastewater, a significant source of global pollution, often contains hazardous chemicals that are difficult to remove and pose serious environmental and health risks. These toxic substances, transported through water, can cause damage to aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity. At the same time, the growing demand for aquaculture requires reliable water quality monitoring to ensure safe, nutritious food. However, current testing methods are expensive, slow, and require samples to be analysed in remote laboratories. The ERC-funded VORTEX SENSOR project aims to revolutionise water quality testing by developing a biosensor that uses vortex microflow induction. This technology, driven by acoustic streaming, ensures efficient compound transport to the sensor surface, enabling on-site detection of pathogens, particularly for salmon aquaculture.
Objective
According to WHO, in 2018, more than 100,000 chemicals were released into the global environment due to their production, use, and disposal. In this regard, water is the key element for their effective transport in the food chain and since remediation can be extremely difficult, such pollution is leading to acute or chronic toxicity in aquatic organisms, loss of habitats and biodiversity as well as human diseases. But, industrial wastewater flows contain hazardous and toxic species that are not easy to process, and treatment installations need extremely reliable and sensitive sensing solutions to continuously monitor the efficiency of the side stream treatment processes. At the same time, the world population is increasingly depending on aquaculture for nutritious food. Frequent analysis of the water quality is essential and needs to be performed at point-of-testing, not in remote laboratories. The common challenges in environmental control, wastewater management and aquaculture are that, in small sample sizes, species need to be detected that are present in very low concentrations, with a technique that can be performed at point-of-testing, at low cost and in a minimum of time. In the last decade, new sensor technologies have emerged that can meet these challenges. These sensors however require the sample to flow over the sensor surface and, importantly, detection is only possible if the target species in flow makes contact with the sensor surface. This is one of the key technological hurdles that todays microfluidics sensors have not overcome yet. In VORTEX SENSOR vortices will be induced in the flow channel with acoustic streaming, an approach which was developed in ERC Starting Grant EVODIS. This will enable long range transport of compounds towards the sensor surface. In VORTEX SENSOR a prototype of the very first biosensor with vortex microflow inducer will be built and its performance will be validated with two relevant pathogens for aquaculture of salmon.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC-POC - HORIZON ERC Proof of Concept Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-POC2
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1050 BRUSSEL
Belgium
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.