From cyber resilience to renewable energy storage, teams of innovators recently exhibited their projects at the National Challenge Fund showcase.
Since 2022, Research Ireland has coordinated and administered the National Challenge Fund (NCF), a €65m research fund that supports academic researchers to work with government, enterprise, public sector organisations and societal stakeholders to address national priorities for Ireland.
The NCF, which was established under the Irish Government’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan and funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, seeks to address challenges in the areas of the green transition and digital transformation and consists of eight challenges (five green and three digital).
With each challenge comprising four phases – Concept, Seed, Grow and Prize – NCF participants develop their solutions, progress through the phases and work towards an overall prize award of €1-2m.
On 30 April, Research Ireland held an NCF showcase event at Croke Park in Dublin, spotlighting 34 projects that had all successfully progressed to the Grow phase of the programme, receiving €500,000 in funding for 12 months as a result.
Hoping to learn more about the NCF and some of the innovative solutions being developed, SiliconRepublic.com headed to the showcase and spoke with some project leaders.
“The challenge fund combines funding with training, with an ability to bring in a much broader team, perhaps, than other research funding streams,” Research Ireland’s Dr Ruth Freeman told SiliconRepublic.com. “To me, that’s why it’s important and that’s why it’s different and why it has the potential to have real impact here in Ireland.”
Cyber resilience
One project lead that we spoke to was Dr Hazel Murray, who told us about her project titled ‘Cyber Resilience – Digital resilience for SMEs’, which looks at supporting small businesses when it comes to cybercrime.
“Increasingly we’re seeing small businesses being targeted as kind of low-hanging fruit, and they don’t have the expertise and they don’t have the support to give them any idea of where even to begin when they’re looking at cybersecurity,” explained Murray.
“So we asked them to rate themselves between one and five about how secure they are, and then at the end of the interview we’d also give our own rating of them.”
According to Murray, the team’s risk assessment tool works by asking SMEs “business-focused questions” in relation to the presence of a website, employee count, whether the company allows remote working and what kind of data is being stored.
“At the end we give them three tips for what they should do immediately to combat their cybersecurity, and we also then give them a risk score in comparison to other people in their sector so they have a bit of an idea of where they sit, and hopefully they can come back a few months later and see that score increasing,” said Murray.
Renewable storage
Another project that we looked at in Croke Park was Renewable Energy Storage Reactor, or RESR, which aims to provide a more beneficial way to harvest and store hydrogen gas as a renewable energy source.
“Our technology, RESR, is a reactor that incorporates a really solid-state material with a catalyst to generate hydrogen safely on demand for any application that hydrogen is required in,” explained project co-lead, Dr James Carton.
Carton says that this technology has potential applications in backup power, as well as sectors such as the automotive, aerospace and aviation industries.
“We think that we will be a piece of the puzzle to actually decarbonise some of these sectors,” he said.
Project lead Dr Andrew Phillips explained that the team’s method of cleanly harvesting hydrogen relies on a material called ammonia borane, a stable material that when combined with a special molecule as a catalyst, releases hydrogen.
“So by doing that, we can create the hydrogen on demand,” explained Phillips. “So we don’t need to store it in very large tanks.
“We can just say, ‘okay, we could just release this amount of hydrogen’, and generally then [that’s] passed into a proton exchange membrane, which is then converted into electrical energy and releases just water.”
Real impact
At the showcase, the project teams also spoke about their experience of taking part in the NCF.
For Murray, participating in the NCF has been massively impactful.
“This was one of the first big fundings I got, and I would say it’s changed the trajectory of both my research and my career,” she said.
Phillips echoed this positive sentiment, highlighting how the NCF has encouraged the development of these solutions.
“This initiative by Research Ireland basically said, ‘here’s some money, put it together and show that it works’,” he said. “So it’s been great to be able to have enough to bring a team together and to also have courses and things like that to get us understanding the thinking, like how can we think together, how can we come up and solve problems?”
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