Considering the significance of the global challenge of future energy production and the role of photovoltaics within it as well as the conditions of international division of labour, the enhancement of links between Germany and India on the field of research and development in thin-film photovoltaics is of strategic importance, and hence one of the major objectives of the project.

Cu(In,Ga)(Se,S)2 (CIGS) as absorber layer constitutes one of the most important thin-film technologies, which are challenging silicon-based solar cells. The main drawback of this system is that it contains the comparatively rare elements indium and gallium, the availability and price of which are suspected to worsen in the future and to reduce the economic potential. Within the project, two approaches for the reduction of these earth metals will be followed and compared. One approach is the reduction of absorber layer thickness while maintaining power conversion efficiency, the other is the replacement of indium and gallium by tin and zinc, leading to the material Cu2ZnSn(Se,S)4 known as Kesterite, which shows promising photovoltaic properties.

Both approaches include optimized preparation processes based on deeper understanding of physics and chemistry of film formation. The preparation of single-phase material with enhanced photovoltaic properties requires in-depth investigations of condensation, crystallization and phase transition processes, which are one of the major objectives of the project. In-situ characterization of layer growth and ex-situ characterization of layers and complete devices will be applied in order to clarify the correlations between process parameters and photovoltaic properties. For both approaches, industrial scale model processes will be realized, which will allow for study of issues relevant for fabrication. These results will be used to evaluate and benchmark both approaches against each other. The results of the project will remove significant road blocks in the development path of thin-film photovoltaics and to considerably influence research and development strategy of contributing partners and other players in the field. A German leading manufacturer of production equipment for photovoltaic systems, an Indian leading company proving comprehensive turnkey services for PV solutions for both, grid connected as well as off-grid applications, and two highly experienced and well-equipped research institutes will collaborate within the project. Due to this unique combination of competences and facilities, the project is a chance to clarify pressuring questions of future development of thin-film photovoltaic technology. An important contribution to the development of the renewable energy sector will be made with a focus on tailor-made production equipment in Germany and large-scale fabrication of solar cells for the world market in India.

Modern high-end cars run a variety of safety-critical, driver assistance and entertainment applications, amounting to 100 million lines of software code, which will grow to 200-300 million lines in the near future. However, ensuring the correctness of such software involves several software engineering, testing and debugging challenges, and pose major hindrance to the introduction of advanced functionality like next-generation driver assistance systems.

The problem is even more serious in electric vehicles, which contain an increased amount of electronics and software. Current software testing and debugging methods are focused on functional verification (i.e., whether the output value is correct). Ensuring the real-time properties of software (i.e., whether the output is produced at the right time) is still largely done on an ad-hoc basis, with high post-implementation testing, debugging and integration costs. Nevertheless, timing correctness is extremely important for safety-critical functionality and for software certification, which is increasingly becoming important within the automotive domain.

The goal of this project is to develop systematic approaches to timing analysis and optimization of automotive software. Timing properties of applications are closely tied to both, the software code and the architecture on which the code executes, which can be 50-100 electronic control units (ECUs) connected by CAN/FlexRay buses. Our approach will be architecture-aware, i.e., model the microarchitectural features of the ECUs, their scheduling policies, and the schedules of the buses over which they communicate. The unique features of our approach compared to current state-of-the art are (i) rather than treating software as arbitrary code, we will take into account the models (e.g., Simulink/Stateflow) from which the code is automatically synthesized, which will tighten and simplify timing analysis, (ii) we will develop techniques for synthesizing ECU and bus schedules automatically from software models and control performance requirements, which will involve the use of powerful constrained optimization, search and verification techniques (e.g., model checking), and (iii) we will extend existing functional software testing and debugging methods to make them architecture- and timing-aware.

The results from this project will be of industrial relevance, will significantly cut down automotive software development/testing costs, and will make next-generation automotive software more reliable. A major goal will be to extend existing software design tools with our proposed methods.

In the last five years a remarkable progress has been made for flexible and printed electronic components. However, the integration of multiple electronic components into completely flexible multifunctional systems is much less maturated. The FLEXIPRIDE project aims at designing such completely flexible multifunctional systems taking into account components with functionalities from multidisciplinary areas such as circuits, antenna, touch sensors, low power displays and solar cells.

Based on these heterogeneous components, a variety of specific multifunctional systems can be designed creating novel application scenarios and attractive synergic market impacts for the involved components. Proposed integrated products are: cheap use-and-throw printed paper solar cells (< 1.0 Euro/W), solar cell powered printed active RFID tags (< 0.2 Euro/tag) and printed electronic security seal (< 0.5 Euro/seal) etc.

FLEXIPRIDE addresses the development/improvement of existing printed electronic components within the consortium and their integration into various innovative multifunctional systems. For the realization of all these systems, the advantages of several printing technologies (screen printing, flexography, gravure, offset, lithography and inkjet) are combined, while keeping cost issues in mind. FLEXIPRIDE addresses not only integration of various electronic components but also required circuit designs and simulations. Quality inspection and control of the printed electronic devices is a prerequisite in order to market the products. Therefore, optical methods will be explored and optical device will be developed to monitor layer thickness and structural defects during printing. At the end of the project a system demonstrator will be presented that will be the basement for an introduction to the market.

The need for developing drug delivery agents has been realized long ago, but the progress made in this area is still not satisfactory. The carrier mediated delivery has several advantages as it enables the delivery of many drug molecules per uptake event and provides isolation from exposure to the systemic environment. We propose to entrap the drug molecules in the matrices of a biocompatible amphiphilic polymeric system.

The project therefore embodies the following broad objectives:

1. To design and develop novel environmentally benign biocatalytic routes to synthesize nanomaterials based upon amphiphilic copolymers
2. To study the entrapment mechanisms of the drug molecules in the nanoparticles and their release inside the cell
3. To study the structural properties of nanomaterials using state of art electron microscopy facilities to eventually standardize the method and allow control of the size and distribution of the particles entrapping biomolecules
4. To analyze bio-distribution and pharmacokinetics in a mice model system
5. To realize efficient delivery of drug and phenotypic expression in a mice model system.
6. To enhance the aqueous solubility and to study the pharmacokinetics (PK) and the pharmacodynamics (PD) of our ‘new chemical entities (NCEs)’ and other molecules of interest.

The proposed study holds enormous significance in the area of medicinal research as researchers across the world are looking for robust, non-toxic, and efficient drug delivery systems.

The regular inspection of concrete structures is necessary to assess their condition and get data to serve as a base for planning maintenance and repair.

Concrete inspection for structure (damages) and material properties (deterioration) is not possible with a single method approach. Effects of deterioration processes and structural changes are non-uniform in nature and must be addressed by a multi-method approach

Robot and scanner systems have facilitated the collection of high quality multi-sensory data. Nevertheless, individual sensor data is often independently analyzed and compared against the data from other sensors at decision level.

Thus, the potential of multi-sensory information is typically not fully realized. Fusing multi-sensory data can close this gap and pave the way for automated evaluation of multimodal data sets

Honeycombing defects (Honeycombs are porous volumes of coarse grain aggregates bonded together by cement) are formed when the fresh concrete ingredients segregate and also due to poor workmanship.

Detection and characterization of honeycombs is a challenging inspection task due to their strong variability in size, shape, position, orientation and density. Moreover, unlike voids of the comparable size, honeycombs introduce a gradual and volumetrically distributed change in material properties.

The main goals of the project were:

1. To develop and Implement automated scanner system for data collection using multi-sensor (Ground Penetrating Radar(GPR), Ultrasonic Pulse Echo (UPE), and Impact Echo (IE)).
2. Development of software tool for visualization of data using data fusion technique by combining radar, ultrasonic pulse echo and impact echo.
3. Evaluation of various inclusions, defects, thickness and voids in concrete structures using multi-sensor techniques.

A means to optimize structural design and specifically the structural health monitoring (SHM) systems associated to those is achieved by simulation. Many of the simulation tools and algorithms for SHM have been developed at disparate locations and for specific applications.

The wide field of SHM encompassing subjects such as materials, structures, fatigue and fracture, physical principles of non-destructive testing (NDT), and possibly much more requires a thorough configuration of networked simulation tools and algorithms leading to something being considered as an open platform for SHM systems simulation and configuration. The main objective of INDEUS is as follows:

1. Establish a simulation platform in non-destructive evaluation (NDE) with an emphasis on SHM
2. Facilitate the understanding of physical parameters travelling through arbitrary structures
3. Identify an optimum transducer configuration for structures to become self-monitoring in the sense of SHM.

The overall outcome from the project is the simulation platform and the demonstrated processes that will help to create SHM based concept of designing structures and develop necessary processes for realizing such concept in an actual hardware and further to meet the emerging application needs in the aerospace and infrastructure industries.

The project established an SHM simulation process flow which was verified with the help of various commercial tools, simulation data and experimental tests developed by respective partners. To bridge the existing gaps in the simulation process, which are in the areas of data integration process, ultrasonic sensor network design and signal simulations, an Ultrasonic NDE-SHM Simulation Software was developed by IISc. The software tool developed is proposed to be used further in extensive simulation and computational benchmarking efforts with industries including Airbus.

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and also those on dialysis (CKD-5D) show an increased cardiovascular mortality and morbidity due to several risk factors including hyperphosphataemia, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, anaemia, dyslipidemia and uremic retention solutes toxicity.

Protein-bound uremic toxins, such as phenylacetic acid, indoxyl sulfate and p-cresylsulfate contribute substantially to the progression of chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, based on their protein-binding these hydrophobic toxins are poorly cleared during conventional hemodialysis or even hemodiafiltration and thus accumulate in CKD-5Dpatients. Therefore, this project aims at the development, characterisation and validation of adsorbant particles for the removal of uremic toxins from plasma of chronic renal failure patients.

The primary task of the kidneys is the elimination of urinary waste products. The kidneys from patients with chronic renal failure are not able to perform this task. It is well known that life expectancy in renal failure is markedly diminished not only due to the symptoms commonly known as "uremic syndrome", but also due to considerably increased cardiovascular mortality. By dialysis this condition can be alleviated, although current dialysis techniques still are far away from replacing the natural elimination of uremic toxins by the kidneys.

Dialysis is based on the principles of diffusion and filtration; the dialysis membranes currently used solely act as filtering membranes. The major drawbacks of current dialysis are related to these principles of action: By filtration and diffusion with a cut-off lower than 18 kDa preferably low molecular weight hydrophilic substances are eliminated, whereas macromolecules as well as protein-bound small molecules are largely retained in the blood plasma. A better understanding on the interaction of uremic toxins with blood proteins and the equilibrium between protein bound toxins and non-protein bound toxins can be controlled is expected to lead to a more effective dialysis.

The elimination of protein-bound hydrophobic low molecular uremic toxins is highly important, since cardiovascular disease with end-stage renal failure thought to be associated with low molecular hydrophobic toxin substances, which are poorly removed by dialysis. These substances have a very low solubility in the aqueous dialysis medium due to their hydrophobicity. Moreover, they exhibit a high degree of protein binding capacity to plasma proteins in case of chronic renal failure patients and can not be removed , because the protein/toxin complex is larger than the cut-off of dialysis membranes. Thus, only the non-protein-bound portion of the respective uremic toxin is removed. Up to now there are no routine methods available to eliminate these low molecular hydrophobic substances from the plasma of dialysis patients. The possibility to increase the pores of the dialysis membranes is limited by the necessity to retain plasma proteins (e.g. albumin) due to their important physiological actions.

The goal of this consortium is development/modification, characterisation and validation of adsorbing material to remove the uremic toxins from serum of renal failure patients. In the development of more effective dialysis techniques, a first step has done is to increase not only life expectancy of renal failure patients, but also their quality of life. E. g., the development of portable dialysis devices crucially depends on more effective elimination techniques allowing sufficient toxin elimination also with lower blood flows than currently used.

Within the experimental design of the NPORE project, project consortium proved that PEI-PVP-I microparticles have a high dewetting contact angle (47°±8), thus a predominant antifouling character is ensured. Next to it, PEI-PVP-I microparticles present suitable hemocompatibility and cytotoxicity as well as higher binding affinity for UTs, thus, PEI-PVP-I microparticles can confidently be considered as a good candidate for further adsorption experiments.