Background
Founded by electrical engineer student Dale Colley, Altitude Thinking Ltd is on a mission to tackle marine pollution by using innovative technology in rivers and canals, capable of monitoring water quality and collection of marine waste.
Challenge
Scotland’s rivers, canals and waterways represent an irreplaceable, high-value resource to the Scottish economy and make a major contribution to the tourism industry and biodiversity.
An electrical engineering graduate from City of Glasgow College, Colley was keen to tap into academic expertise to seek help in applying technology to tackle water pollution. He was looking for an innovative solution to develop, construct and test a prototype of a programmable drone that will be able to be deployed and subsequently safely navigate Scottish waterways and produce accurate, real-time reports on water pollution levels and in the future to remove litter and other pollutants from waterways using suction pumps.
Although Colley had no previous experience of drones or the marine sector, as an engineer he knew he could invent a device that could monitor water quality and tackle marine pollution.
Solution
The City of Glasgow College is one of Scotland’s largest Further and Higher Education colleges and the UK’s number one college for WorldSkills UK, which is a partnership between business, education and governments to accelerate the development of young people’s skills from national to world-class standards.
The College is renowned for its work in the areas of Nautical Studies, Engineering and Maritime studies and has a mix of skills, workshop facilities and expertise required for this project such as electronics, electrical systems, marine engineering, navigation and propulsion – under one roof at the college’s Riverside Campus.
City of Glasgow College’s STEM and Innovation Lead, Douglas Morrison had the necessary academic expertise and was keen to work in partnership with Altitude Thinking Ltd to develop, construct and test a prototype of a programmable drone. The suggested prototype will be a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) equipped with motors making it capable of being deployed to a Scottish waterway alongside a range of sensors and data gathering and transmission facilities, allowing it to report back on pollutants detected.
Most people think of drones as craft that fly in the air but his is designed to travel on the surface of rivers and canals to monitor water quality. Altitude Thinking hopes to develop it even further to have the capability to collect litter, cleaning up Scotland’s waterways and freeing them of blockages – rather like the little robot vacuums that can be programmed to clean floors.
This collaboration project was successfully awarded a £5000 Scottish Funding Council (SFC) Innovation Voucher, administered by Interface to allow partners to look at engineering development for subsequent drones with enhanced capabilities to remove litter and other pollutants from waterways using suction pumps.
This innovative project combines portability with pollution detection, as well as data gathering and transmission, allowing for larger models to be built up over a longer period.
Business benefits
- Increased knowledge of engineering principles applied to prototype design
- Insights into using drones to benefit environmental sustainability
- Plans for further developments with litter extraction capability
- Potential new job opportunities
An award of an Innovation Voucher has taken Coley from the design stage to making a physical prototype which, with the help from Scottish Canals, is currently going through field trials monitoring water quality in canals.
Academic benefits
- Staff development/ Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunity for staff working on an innovative project
- Involvement in testing and deployment of mark 1 prototype: field work opportunity
- Increased knowledge of drone technology for use in Scottish waterways
- Increased awareness of environmental sustainability that can be communicated through updates in lecturing and teaching materials
Douglas added:
“Dale’s novel application and the way he has integrated them is what adds value and presents an opportunity to change how environmental conditions are monitored in Scotland. His long-term ambition is to support the clean-up of canals and rivers and with supported funding to commercialise it he anticipates seeing it on the market within the next year.”
“It’s a wonderful product and looks incredible. It’s really cool – like a water-bound batmobile – and I believe it will help us to have a better understanding of what is happening within our rivers and canals. What is particularly interesting about it is that it is very much based on a range of readily available sensor technologies.”
Additional impacts
This collaborative project has already delivered a series of successful outcomes associated with the mark 1 drone, its testing and ongoing reviews, modifications and future markets.
Altitude Thinking’s invention has been recognised locally and nationally for its innovative work when being shortlisted for the Global Game-changers for Young Entrepreneurs and made the final shortlist for the Shell Livewire.
Dale has also presented his recent work to her Royal Highness – Princess Anne on her visit to the City of Glasgow College.
Follow on activity
December 2020 – City of Glasgow College, in collaboration with Altitude Thinking Ltd, has been awarded £23,500 to support the ongoing development of a mobile device that will read and analyse water quality. The project aims to deliver a new prototype – Aquabot 2.0. This drone can be remotely operated on the surface of rivers, canals or lochs to monitor water quality. The grant was awarded by the Innovation Centre for Sensor and Imaging Systems (CENSIS) who are also contributing their expertise on engineering wirelessly operating IoT devices.
Please note that Interface administers the Innovation Voucher Scheme on behalf of the Scottish Funding Council. All funding applications are reviewed on a case by case basis by the Scottish Funding Council, guidelines can be found here.
Background
Renewable Parts Ltd. (RPL) is one of the leading suppliers of parts for wind turbines in the UK. They are an independent supply chain specialist, providing worldwide delivery of quality parts and consumables direct to site from an extensive collection of centrally held stock.
Challenge
The UK & Ireland market for wind turbines is substantial and growing strongly, with the lifecycle of a wind turbine typically estimated to be 25 years.
Critically, as turbines age, parts consumption rises and customers begin to seek alternatives to long-term service agreements due to shortening planning horizons. This is the point that the need for repair development becomes particularly vital.
Renewable Parts Ltd were looking to develop an innovation programme for the repair of wind turbine parts requiring significant technical expertise from a Scottish university in the areas of market research, technical assessment, design and test before production-ready solutions could be delivered. Following on from this, they were also interested in setting up a Centre of Excellence hub in the field of wind turbine parts repair.
The company also wanted the academic partner to identify and work jointly with industry partners to develop these remanufactured component parts on a commercial basis.
Solution
The company was referred to Interface by Highlands & Islands Enterprise. Interface successfully matched the company with the University of Strathclyde who has expertise across the business and technology areas that the Renewable Parts Ltd project required.
In this collaborative project, the University was looking to apply a multi-disciplinary approach to identify the tasks and areas to be researched. They believed that the combination of the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, the Strathclyde Institute for Operations Management (SIOM) and the Scottish Institute for Remanufacture (SIR), hosted at the University of Strathclyde, provided the multi-disciplinary approach needed for the new business models/process that Renewable Parts wanted to investigate, as well as the technology expertise required for remanufacturing of wind turbines.
The project investigated data on wind turbine component failure rates to identify which components could be remanufactured/repaired/reconditioned, and the Strathclyde team completed a report for the company which outlined a number of potential components that might be of interest.
Benefits
Renewable Parts Ltd was successful in not only establishing a partnership with Strathclyde University but in securing funding from the Energy Technology Partnership. The total cost of their initial project was £23,075, with ETP contributing £13,575 in cash, and RPL contributing £9,500 in-kind.
The funding allowed RPL to develop implementation processes for two of these components, enabling the remanufacture/repair/recondition of said parts in-house. This meant that RPL could create a new manufacturing base in their original site of Lochgilphead in Argyll, an economically fragile region of the Highlands and Islands, creating jobs and supply chain opportunities.
In December 2018, the company secured a £171k grant from Zero Waste Scotland. Renewable Parts, which has an operations centre in Renfrew, will use the money for refurbishment projects developed out of Lochgilphead in conjunction with its research partner, the University of Strathclyde.
Chief executive James Barry said: “The opportunity to improve recycling rates within the wind industry is significant.” “The award provided a huge vote of confidence in Renewable Parts and the innovation programme it is driving with the university, in what is seen as a growth industry for Scotland.”
Follow-on Activity
RPL are now in phase two of project implementation, pursuing funding opportunities through Government bodies and Industry, and working with University of Strathclyde as their innovation partner.
The company was a finalist for the 2018 VIBES (Scottish Environment Business Awards) in the Circular Economy category, in recognition of their commitment to tackling environmental challenges. They also reached the finals of the Glasgow Business Awards, the Scottish Resources Awards and the Inspiring City Awards.
Impacts of COVID-19 on the business
Certain commitments were pushed back for the initial few weeks of lockdown, however, with a business-as-usual approach, Renewable Parts Ltd continued to grow throughout this time and employed new members of the team in sales, HR, marketing and procurement.
This is (June 2020) a critical time for the business as the first generation of wind turbines are approaching the end of their operational lives – at around 20/25 years old – providing a significant opportunity to capture new business. The company is in the application phase for a second grant with Zero Waste Scotland to continue working with the University of Strathclyde as a partner for developing new capabilities to help its customers reach sustainable business models.
Background
Ecometrica is an end-to-end environmental software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider that is recognised as one of the world’s top sustainability brands. Incorporated in 2008, the company has unrivalled experience in helping businesses and governments identify risks and opportunities by combining satellite earth observation data with local information and business intelligence on the award-winning Ecometrica Platform. Ecometrica now has over 250 corporate clients, including ARM, Pearson, Compass Group, Etsy and Hertz.
Ecometrica brings together recognised experts in environmental and sustainability accounting, and their software supports all aspects of sustainability planning, operations and reporting. Their data and services are available from all their worldwide locations. Founded in Edinburgh in 2008, they also have offices in Montreal (2009), London (2012), Boston (2014) and Mexico (2017).
In 2013, a project team, led by the University of Edinburgh and comprising of local SME partners, LTS International and Ecometrica, successfully applied to the DFID (Department for International Development) Hectares Indicator Project – International Climate Fund (ICF) forestry programme. DFID awarded £32,000 to the team to review and suggest improvements to their methodology for quantifying hectares of avoided forest loss and forest restored as a result of international development finance.
SFC Innovation Voucher Follow On Funding
In 2014, a Scottish Funding Council (SFC) Follow On Innovation Voucher of £11,600 was awarded to Ecometrica and Dr Edward Mitchard from the University of Edinburgh (UoE) for a project titled Earth Observation support for assessing the performance of the UK government’s ICF forest projects.
This follow on funding allowed Dr Mitchard to undertake additional analysis over Brazil to test the suitability of different earth observation (EO) satellite products for monitoring forest change. The project results gave Ecometrica a better understanding of the accuracy of the EO products, and enabled them to improve their testing and performance assessment offerings to institutions such as DFID, DECC, DEFRA, World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank.
“The Innovation Voucher is a fantastic scheme that made it really easy for me to work with a local SME and conduct research with real and immediate impact. My relationship with Ecometrica has grown since the Follow On Innovation Voucher was awarded, with it contributing to the development of ideas towards our current much larger collaborative projects. I would strongly encourage other academics to engage with Interface, who administer this SFC programme”, said Dr Edward Mitchard, University of Edinburgh.
Benefits of the Collaborative Project
Edinburgh University and Ecometrica will continue to establish a leading position in Europe for this type of work. The benefits to the University of Edinburgh will be felt in terms of its international research and innovation ranking, and its reputation in the fields of forest ecology and the application of space technology. Ecometrica expects to continue its growth in this area:
- Academics and students at the University of Edinburgh School of Geosciences are among the first to gain unlimited access to millions of pounds worth of state-of-the-art Earth Observation, geospatial intelligence and satellite mapping applications, thanks to a groundbreaking memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the University and Ecometrica. The MoU formalises the ongoing collaboration between Ecometrica and the University of Edinburgh, which is expected to be worth around £4.5m to both parties over a five year period. Ecometrica will make its Mapping suite – a web-based, universal, disruptive geographic information system (GIS) – available on a limitless basis to the University, so that it can be used for research and teaching purposes.
- Ecometrica won a contract from the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Space Programme worth over £14m. The ‘Forests 2020’ project is to help countries improve the management and protection across 300 million hectares of tropical forests – 12 times the size of the United Kingdom – and sees Ecometrica lead an international consortium that brings together many of the world’s leading experts on forest monitoring. The University of Edinburgh contributes to this project by expanding and automating their accuracy analysis of the existing University of Maryland products, and research alternatives for when this performs poorly (as well as expanding the deforestation analysis into the future using full carbon models to help with scenario analysis). This project also funded 3-year licences for University of Edinburgh staff to use Ecometrica’s EO Labs to disseminate results of their analyses. The initiative, now involving seven countries, has already led to many new partnerships and collaborations worldwide, and has been invaluable in developing solutions, while ensuring they are ideally suited for monitoring every aspect of modern environmental concerns. ‘Forests 2020’ has recently been extended to include monitoring banana plantations, soya farms and palm oil plantations.
- Both Indonesia and Ghana have made commitments to working with Ecometrica in the decade ahead, enabling a greater focus on sustainable forest management and the conservation of tropical forests. The company is also working with a growing number of blue chip corporates, committed to better understanding their roles and responsibilities in tackling climate change.
- Through this project, Edward Mitchard at UoE developed a greater understanding of which forest cover change products work best in which landscapes. This knowledge led to a guidance document on forest change monitoring produced under contract from DFID, and to an understanding of areas and types of forest change where no current product works well. There is clearly a wide user base for forest change products. Dr Mitchard applied for funding from the EU and UK research councils and other sources to develop better, satellite radar-based methods for mapping forest change, with clear long-term commercial implications (that could potentially be developed in partnership with Ecometrica).