All the awards in an inventor awards scheme organised by two Cork third level institutions have gone to Cork-based recipients.
The ICT Invention of the Year award went to Pleun Maaskant, Brian Corbett and Mahbub Akhter from the Tyndall Institute in Cork. .
The winning invention relates to a super luminescent LED device, known as SLED. This is a brighter and more powerful form of LED and has applications in driverless cars, communications, environmental monitoring and gesture recognition.
The Tyndall Institute team has invented a novel structure and a new, lower cost fabrication route for making these devices. Commercialisation activities are progressing, and the SLED technology is being evaluated for its potential to develop a startup company.
Pleun Maaskant received his MSc degree in Applied Physics from the University of Groningen. He joined the Tyndall Institute in 1983 and has worked as a research scientist on a number of projects funded by Enterprise Ireland to develop micro-LEDs (light emitting diodes) with a novel light extraction configuration, based on the formation of parabolic reflectors around the light emitting semiconductor junction.
In Association with
The Invention of the Year Awards are organised by UCC, Cork Institute of Technology and Teagasc, and sponsored by patent specialists Purdy Lucey (based in Dublin).
UCC Professor Noel Caplice took the Life Sciences Invention Award for his stem cell invention which has developed a way to grow stem cells taken from a patient’s own blood onto a degradable scaffold.
Professor Richard Linger of CIT’s Nimbus Centre also received an award for a predictive energy control optimization system called SESOP, which gives customers low risk access to the electricity wholesale market to save up to 25% of energy costs.
SESOP has been in development since 2012 with over €1m of R&D funding. It is currently being deployed on trial sites in commercial properties, apartments and water-related assets.
Photo: UCC’s Tim Roche (left) with Pleun Maaskant. Pic: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
