In this COSMAC project, we propose to develop joint optimization algorithms, allowing the sizing of energy sources (photovoltaic, fuel cell, and grid) with hydrogen storage and the energy supervision, which will be applied to a commercial building considering several objectives. The joint optimization of the sizing and the energy management will consider many criteria such as self-consumption, the cost of energy, possible interactions with the grid, the integration of numerous electric vehicles charging stations on the parking lot, the economic and ecological life cycle and the energy impact of users. The advantage of locally produced green hydrogen is that it can be used for long-term energy storage, but it can also be used to power nearby fuel stations. The developed algorithms will be the subject of a modular and easy-to-use tool.

Correlated materials are highly promising for micro and nanoelectronics, with the possibility to change the state of matter by a short electrical or optical excitation. In particular, the use of the dynamic phase transition observed in canonical narrow gap Mott insulators, which gives rise to specific volatile and non-volatile resistive switching under electric pulses, has been proposed for the realization of ultra-compact artificial neurons. The NANODYN project aims to achieve a multiscale analysis offered by the use of a multiprobe scanning tunneling microscop coupled to a time resolved optical system, to determine the fundamental properties necessary for the development of basic neuromorphic components at the nanoscale. The project also includes the fabrication and characterisation of Mott insulators single layers in view of future compact neuromorphic devices implementation.

The unprecedented Covid-19 sanitary crisis has highlighted the lack of means and the organization deficiencies that prevail in France in its fight against pandemics. Protective respirators such as FFP2 and surgical masks figure among the means for fighting the virus and have first been dedicated to health workers or to people infected with the virus. In order to stop the propagation of the virus, a new category of masks has been created (non sanitary use: Usage Non Sanitaire, UNS) for the general public (also called community masks), with its own specific regulation. To meet the urgency of the situation and to compensate our lack of capacity to import or produce masks in Europe and France, many textile companies have switched their usual production to community mask production based on woven and knitted materials. To this day, face coverings are widely used and face masks are even mandatory in the public space. However, the quality of the masks available on the market is highly heterogeneous, including in surgical masks that are imported and used by the general public. We can also note a reluctance of the public to trust masks produced with woven fabrics: their comfort and their lesser performance compared to surgical masks have been questioned, despite their much lower environmental impact compared to the latter. The MASCOFIL project arises from the will of several academic institutes of the Hauts-de-France (ENSAIT, HEI and Institut Catholique de Lille) to work on new technical solutions in the design and production of high quality community masks that use local and national resources in view of a new pandemic. The project, which has the ambition to be rapidly transferable to the economic field, is also built on a partnership with IFTH (industrial textile centre) and with industrial companies from the Region and beyond (Andritz, Duflot, Macopharma, TIO-NT). In order to respond to the need of differentiating the masks produced (in terms of gender, age, application fields …), and to promote the best acceptability of the masks from the public, there will be surveys conducted among different publics and the results will be taken into account as far as possible in our mask development. The final product that is aimed at is a protective community mask that is innovative and ambitious, efficient in terms of filtration, comfortable to wear, breathable, and washable. The filtration media will be produced using carding and spunlace technologies, i.e nonwoven processes that are alternative to those used in FFP2 and surgical masks and have the advantage of being more widely present in France and can hence be easily mobilizable in case of a pandemic. The electrospinning process will also be investigated. Furthermore, these media will have the particularity of being thermally weldable so that the masks can be produced on automatic machines and hence, ensure a very high productivity in order to respond to an urgent and important demand for masks.

Nowadays, integrated circuits consist of very dense assemblies of heterogeneous materials at lengths scales below the diffusive regime of heat conduction. These materials are the place of many interfaces that are limiting heat dissipation. In this context, metal semi-conductor junctions are targets for heat transfer optimization. The project EFFICACE aims at improving the understanding of heat transfer at interfaces between a metal and a semiconductor (SC), i.e. at Schottky contacts, and providing solutions to enhance heat transport at contacts. Lower thermal boundary resistances (TBR) are effectively obtained for metal/metal interfaces. The main idea is to find solution to obtain such low TBR in metal/SC interfaces with doped SC substrates for increasing electron/electron and electron/phonon interactions at interfaces. However, in some cases, the Schottky barrier (SB) limits these electron interactions. The goal is then to better understand the thermoelectric phenomena that occur at SB to be able to propose in the future solutions to the optimization of heat transfer management within dense electronic devices. One of the fundamental issues in thermal transport at these scales is that heat transfer laws basically differ compared with those at macroscale. Kapitza or thermal boundary resistance and ballistic transport play important roles. The couplings between heat transport by phonons and electrons and thermoelectric effects simultaneously occur in active devices. In parallel, from the electronic transport point of view, it has been shown that a 2 nm interfacial dielectric layer can enhance the electrical contact by suppressing the Fermi level pinning and coupling via Metal Induced Gap States while preserving substantial electron transport by tunneling. Is it possible to obtain such a counter-intuitive, interface enhancement, from the thermal point of view? A multitude of questions can then emerge. What magnitude of electrical current influences heat transfer in Schottky diode? How does electron density or Schottky Barrier Height (SBH) affect the interfacial thermal resistance? What is the influence of temperature on all these effects? Our goal is to answer these questions. To analyze the distinct phenomena and explore different routes to enhance interfacial transport and decrease TBR, we propose to study materials with different electrical properties: 1) Electronic density: Influence of the silicon doping level on metal/Si thermal resistance, 2) SBH: Is there a systematic correlation between barrier height and metal/Si TBR? 3) Electrical bias (electronic assisted heat transfer): Influence of electrical polarization on TBR. Electron current could increase heat transfer at interface and so decrease TBR but not in all configurations. Indeed, different cases occur depending on the electrical contact (rectifying or ohmic) and on the direction of the current. 4) Interface engineering: influence of a few nm dielectric layer (Al2O3 and HfO2) intercalation on TBR; EFFICACE targets breakthroughs in developing the theoretical, modeling and experimental tools to control the electron energy/heat flux channels in a solid-state device. The outputs of the project are the critical parameters expected to significantly decrease the TBR. Through a global and fundamental understanding of interfacial heat transport, we will be able to propose new routes for efficient heat management in electronic devices and for thermal diodes, rectification effect, or heat-assisted data storage applications.

While the mechanics of the cell as a whole is a well-studied subject, we are still missing a detailed understanding of the mechanisms by which mechanical stresses are transmitted to the nucleus; and what is the effect of mechanical deformation on the nuclear processes, involving modifications and damage to the chromatin and of the downstream genetic functions. We are developing micro-electromechanical (MEMS) devices, by which we are able to apply controlled forces to whole living cells, while performing real time confocal imaging. In parallel, we started a theoretical research program, by all-atom and coarse-grained molecular dynamics, for the multi-scale simulation of mechanical stress transfer to the nuclear constituents. In this project DNASTRIX we aim at extending and combining these experimental-theoretical techniques, to investigate in depth how nuclear mechanics can be altered by forces issued from the extracellular environment, and what are some potential genomic implications of such mechanical processes, possibly involved in many human diseases, from the cellular down to the molecular scale. In a first part of the work, we will apply forces to selected cell lines by MEMS devices, to observe and quantify the mechanical links between extranuclear cell structures and nucleus; in the second part, we will track by confocal microscopy chromatin reorganization, and identify with fluorescent reporters the possible molecular damage to chromatin and DNA, arising from mechanical forces. Micro-mechanical experiments will guide, and will be analyzed by multiscale computational models. These will (1) represent chromatin, the nucleus and its neighboring cellular environment at a coarse-grained, micrometer scale; and (2) set up a parallel, atomistic description of DNA and nuclear proteins by molecular dynamics simulations. The results of theoretical elaborations will, in turn, provide insights and suggestions, to be fed back into the experiments.