While pandemic lockdowns and travel bans are having a severe impact on spontaneity and creativity in research [see ‘Lacking creativity‘ on October 28th, 2020], they have induced a high level of ingenuity to achieve the final objective of the DIMES project, which is to conduct prototype demonstrations and evaluation tests of the DIMES integrated measurement system.  We have gone beyond the project brief by developing a remote installation system that allows local engineers at a test site to successfully set-up and run our measurement system. This has saved thousands of airmiles and several tonnes of CO2 emissions as well as hours waiting in airport terminals and sitting in planes.  These savings were made by members of our project team working remotely from their bases in Chesterfield, Liverpool, Ulm and Zurich instead of flying to the test site in Toulouse to perform the installation in a section of a fuselage, and then visiting a second time to conduct the evaluation tests.  For this first remote installation, we were fortunate to have our collaborator from Airbus available to support us [see ‘Most valued player on performs remote installation‘ on December 2nd, 2020].  We are about to stretch our capabilities further by conducting a remote installation and evaluation test during a full-scale aircraft test at the Aerospace Research Centre of the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa, Canada with a team who have never seen the DIMES system and knew nothing about it until about a month ago.  I could claim that this remote installation and test will save another couple of tonnes of CO2; but, in practice, we would probably not be performing a demonstration in Canada if we had not developed the remote installation capability. 

The University of Liverpool is the coordinator of the DIMES project and the other partners are Empa, Dantec Dynamics GmbH and Strain Solutions Ltd.  Airbus is our topic manager.

The DIMES project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 820951.  The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.