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NPL Researchers involved in a European project to promote the development of renewable energies in the Atlantic Area.  Read recent Press Coverage on https://www.irishtimes.com/business/innovation/dcu-team-examines-use-of-drones-to-monitor-wind-and-solar-farms-1.4126875 The DURABLE project, which is the first of its kind, aims to solve current challenges in the operation and maintenance of wind and solar energy parks, by accelerating the performance of renewable energies through the validation and demonstration of aerospace technologies.  The application of this technology will automate inspection and repair tasks, reducing costs and favouring production. It plans to conclude with the realisation of a model and a test of the solution in a pilot project.
A total of 10 European partners across France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and UK are involved and a budget of €3.9M has been co-financed by the Interreg Atlantic Area Program through the European Regional Development Fund. Prof Patrick McNally will be leading the DCU research team effort into the use of non-invasive radio frequency techniques for remote monitoring of wind turbine and solar farm performance. Further details at www.durableproject.eu

NPL Researcher, Dr Rajani Vijayaraghavan has recently won the Best Poster award at the 21st International Conference on Advances in Materials & Processing Technologies (AMPT 2018), Dublin, 4-7 Sept.2018.  The poster entitled "Controlled growth of single to few layer graphene films with excellent anticoagulation properties: temperature plays a key role" was authored by Rajani K. Vijayaraghavan, C. Gaman, B. Jose, A. McCoy, P.J. McNally and S. Daniels. More details on http://ampt2018.org/

Commencing January 2018, Prof Patrick McNally has been appointed Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics. Published by Springer, with an impact factor ca. 2.0, JMSE is an established refereed companion to the Journal of Materials Science. It publishes papers on materials and their applications in modern electronics covering the ground between the fundamental science, such as semiconductor physics, and work concerned solely with applications. It features not only the growth and preparation of new materials, but also their processing, fabrication, bonding and encapsulation, together with the reliability, failure analysis, quality assurance and characterisation related to the whole range of applications in electronics.
Further details are available at www.springeronline.com/journal/10854

I-FORM ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING RESEARCH CENTRE. Science Foundation Ireland
announced (May 2017) the funding of four new SFI Research Centres including the "Innovative techniques and processes in Additive Manufacturing" centre, called I-Form.  NPL researchers have been funded under I-Form, and will provide novel non-destructive radio frequency, x-ray and photoacoustic metrologies for additive manufacturing process quality monitoring. Prof Patrick McNally will be working with the I-Form Deputy Director, Prof Dermot Brabazon of APT, on developing and validating these new technologies in a processing environment. More details on www.i-form.ie
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Exciting novel nondestructive x-ray diffraction imaging techniques have been pioneered by the Dublin-Durham-Freiburg research team led by Prof Patrick McNally of NPL and has been publicised as a Science Highlight by the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire (UK), one of Europe's largest and most advanced research facilities. Using the intense x-ray beams generated at Diamond, the team has developed a suite of techniques capable of accurately, precisely and verifiably measuring the stress and warpage in silicon die inside fully encapsulated advanced chip packages. These packages are under development for next generation integrated circuit deployment and the work points the way to a new industry based quality assurance technique.  Further details are available on
www.diamond.ac.uk/Science/Research/Highlights/2017/warped-microchips.html

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Dr Stephen Daniels of NPL was awarded a Health Research Board & Science Foundation Ireland research grant under the Translational Research Awards programme. This project is entitled "Improved Methods to Detect and Decontaminate Environmental Sources of Healthcare-Associated Infection" and runs in collaboration with Professor Hilary Humphreys in RCSI/Beaumont Hospital, Dublin.

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patrick  mcnally

PMN Image

Prof. Patrick McNally, BE, ScM, PhD, FIEI, FInstP,CEng, CPhys, SMIEEE.

Contact:
patrick(dot)mcnally(at)dcu(dot)ie

Prof. Patrick McNally received a BE (First Class Hons.) degree from University College, Galway, Ireland, and the degrees of ScM and PhD from Brown University, Rhode Island, USA in 1988 and 1992, respectively.

He is a  Full Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University, where he served as Head of School (2012-2015). He has more than 30 years’ experience in non-invasive non-destructive metrology techniques.

He is Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics. He has authored or co-authored more than 300 scientific papers, holds two patents and has five pending.

In 2010 he was a founder and CTO of Sonex Metrology Ltd., a company offering photoacoustics metrology solutions for the semiconductor IC and packaging markets.

Prof. McNally’s main research interests include plasma materials process monitoring via Radio Emission Spectroscopy (RES), nanomaterials and electronic device process characterisation (including x-ray diffraction imaging and photoacoustic metrology), portable photoacoustics systems for 
bio-detection, and copper halides for photonics applications.


Full details of publications etc. at
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrick_Mcnally2
https://dcu.academia.edu/PatrickMcNally
https://ie.linkedin.com/pub/patrick-mcnally/34/3b/70


stephen daniels

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Prof. Stephen Daniels, BEng, PhD, MIEEE.

Contact:
stephen(dot)daniels(at)dcu(dot)ie


Stephen is Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering. His primary scientific technical competence is in the area of integrated circuit manufacturing processes and novel thin film deposition techniques. He also has extensive experience in product design and development. He has spent time working at Philips Research, IMEC and the Applied Materials laboratories in California, and maintains significant national and international linkages within the broader plasma and semiconductor processing industry.


Stephen also directs DCU's Energy and Design Laboratory (EDL) in DCU. The EDL was established to facilitate fundamental and applied research in energy engineering, with a particular emphasis on the design, modelling, and analysis of sustainable energy systems and installations, and the design of energy efficient devices.

Full details of publications etc. at
http://energylab.eeng.dcu.ie
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-daniels-41358a4/

http://www.dcu.ie/research/people/stephen-daniels.shtml
http://daniels.eeng.dcu.ie/
News and Forthcoming Activities
Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics Patrick McNally appointed as Eeitor of JMSE (2016- ). See www.springeronline.com/journal/10854

Recent Publications

  • ""Mechanism of Stress Relaxation and Phase Transformation in Additively Manufactured Ti-6Al-4V via in situ High Temperature XRD and TEM Analyses", F.R.Kaschel, R.K.Vijayaraghavan, A. Shmeliov, E.K.McCarthy , M.Canavan, P.J.McNally, D.P.Dowlinga, V.Nicolosi andf M.Celikin, Acta Materialia, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2020.02.056 (Feb 2020).
  • "Evaluation via powder metallurgy of nano-reinforced iron powders developed for selective laser melting applications" A. Mussatto, R. Groarke, A.A-HameedacInam, U.I.Ahad, R.K. Vijayaraghavan, A. O'Neill, P.J.McNally, Y. Delaure, and D. Brabazon, Materials & Design182, 108046 (2019).
  • "Quantitative Imaging of the Stress/Strain Fields and Generation of Macroscopic Cracks from Indents in Silicon", B.K. Tanner, D. Allen, J. Wittge, A.N. Danilewsky, J. Garagorri, E. Gorostegui-Colinas, M.R. Elizalde and P.J. McNally, Crystals  7, 347 (2017); doi:10.3390/cryst7110347
  •  "A universal method for thermal conductivity measurements on micro-/nano-films with and without substrates using micro-Raman spectroscopy", N.M. Wight, E. Acosta, R.K. Vijayaraghavan, P.J. McNally, V. Smirnov and  N.S. Bennett, Thermal Science and Engineering Progress 3, pp. 95-101, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsep.2017.06.009
  • "Nondestructive, in situ mapping of die surface displacements in encapsulated IC chip packages using x-ray diffraction imaging techniques", N.E. Gorji, B.K. Tanner, R.K Vijayaraghavan, A.N Danilewsky and and P.J. McNally, Proc. IEEE 67th Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC 2017), https://doi.org/10.1109/ECTC.2017.175
  • “Nondestructive X-ray diffraction measurement of warpage in silicon dies embedded in integrated circuit packages”, B. K. Tanner, A. N. Danilewsky, R. K. Vijayaraghavan, A. Cowley and P. J. McNally, J. Appl. Cryst. 50, pp. 547–554 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576717003132
  •  "Remote sensing of a low pressure plasma in the radio near field" by S. Kelly and P.J. McNally, Appl. Phys. Express (2017) 10 096101. https://doi.org/10.7567/APEX.10.096101






commercialisation

Technology and IP developed by NPL researchers has led to the spin out of numerous start-ups.

These include:

www.sonex-metrology.com

www.qualflow.com
www.arannhealthcare.iewww.lexasresearch.com


For further details, please contact our INVENT Centre in DCU.