The main idea of the project relies on cellulose-based films featuring passive water management by microfluidic structures. The base material is biobased, biodegradable, and broadly available. Unfortunately, the mechanical properties (tear resistance, stretchability, penetration stability) are not sufficient for agricultural applications. Moreover, in horticulture, cellulose is prone to the formation of fungi and mould. These drawbacks will be overcome by combination of different cellulose types like plant-based cellulose, regenerated cellulose and bacterial cellulose. Additional coatings will be applied that partly immerse the film. Such coatings will be modified in view of its surface structure to achieve water management or avoid mold formation in horticulture. This will be done using imprint technologies in combination with coating technologies. Such nano- or micro-imprint technologies are known to be used for high-end applications like generating lab-on-chip devices for medical applications. A new approach will be investigated using electron beam curing technologies to validate such structuring method in low-cost applications like mulch films utilizing high-speed capabilities of e-beam curing processes. The water management will be nature-inspired mimic e.g. leaf structures. Using atmospheric plasma technologies hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity of structures will be optimized by changes in surface chemistry. Tuning the surface properties will also have an important impact on biodegradability. The goal is to develop a toolbox that allows to use the novel mulch materials for a variety of applications in agriculture and horticulture and at different climate conditions. Development targets TRL 5 by validating at real field tests. Nevertheless, all different technological building blocks will be scaleable to roll-to-roll production, ensuring high productivity and allowing low-cost products in the future.

Today, silicone contamination is one of the main challenges for players of the electronics sector which require the use of Pressure Sensitive Adhesives (PSA). Silicon contamination can drive to 10-20% of defective products. The release liners used for this PSA require low levels of extractible silicone (<20 ng/cm²). Besides, the adhesives used in the electronic market are solvent based. Today, solvent resistant release liners present still high levels of extractible silicone. On the other hand, those release liners with low extractible silicone are not solvent resistant and often do not present high subsequent adhesion. XIMOFILM is also a release liner addressed to the medical sector, where silicone and soft silicone gel adhesives are increasingly used. In this sector the release liners must also present low level of extractible silicones. Founded in 2001, CPI is a spin-off French pioneering company offering complete service for industrial atmospheric plasma integration addressed to professionals of packaging, printing, polymer transformations and textiles. Thanks to the optimisation and industrialisation of our cold atmospheric plasma technology, CPI will offer the first ultra-low extractable film silicone release liners with good release force properties (low) and high subsequent adhesion of the adhesive (more than 90% compared to 65% of current competitors), solvent resistant and with very low silicone contamination (<10ng/cm²). The production cost will be also reduced, allowing to purchasing prices 30% cheaper than our competitors. For this Phase 1, we will focus on the technical and financial feasibility of XIMOFILM process and well define the business model to extend our commercial network to Europe and Asia. For CPI, this project will imply a ROI of 9% in 2024. For end users, XIMOFILM will represent an opportunity to reduce damaged final products due to silicone which would save them up to 15% due to after sales services and wasted devices.

Diabetes is one of the main health risks today with near pandemic dimension, causing blindness, kidney failures, stroke, heart attack, giving rise to very high health care costs (25% in the US) and reducing the quality of life of around 500 million people worldwide. The level of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) is used to assess long-term glycemic control and is the best predictor for the risk of developing chronic complication of diabetes and appropriate follow up of the patients. The golden standard is an expert laboratory HPLC method focusing on HbA1c quantification, which has limitations when other relevant hemoglobin variants are to be detected. For approximately 7 % of the world’s population which are carriers of such hemoglobin variants current methods lead to under-, over- or non-estimation of the HbA1c fraction. VortexLC will not only improve the quality of the analysis to give an instant full picture of the health status of diabetes patients, it will also produce a cheap point of care device. The use of vortex flows renders the approach compatible with mass manufacturing of plastic pillar array columns, that are not only much cheaper than commonly used packed bed columns, but wherein also higher separation performances can be obtained. The polymer columns will be fabricated using UV-nanoimprint lithography, plasma technology to make them porous and add a chromatographic coating, and lamination to close the column, all processes that can be scaled to roll-to-roll industrial manufacturing. The columns will be embedded in an instrument that allows for integrated sample preparation and miniaturized UV absorption and SERS detection, allowing for both quantification and identification of analytes. In the project a low footprint demonstrator of the novel system and columns will be built and tested with first synthetic, next human blood samples to quantify Hb1Ac and its genetic variants.