Project description: A group of 30 leading European companies and academic institutions work together in the newly established ENLIGHT project, a program which is partly funded by the European Union and EU countries. Partners include companies throughout the lighting value chain, including universities and research centre.
The future of both domestic and professional lighting is LED, taking advantage of the intrinsic benefits of this new technology. This will lead to new lighting solutions which are not possible with conventional lighting technology. The ENLIGHT project aims to exploit the full potential of LED based lighting solutions through breakthrough innovations in integrated lighting solutions beyond the retrofit applications.
This includes innovations in integrated lighting solutions and intelligent lighting systems with the aim to further reduce energy consumption up to an additional 40% compared to today’s LED systems. One of the targets of the ENLIGHT project is to develop more compact and efficient lighting electronics, drivers and controls, which together will lead to optimised LED modules. In addition, developments will be aimed at maximising the impact of LED by improving its energy efficiency and to lower the system costs involved. Finally, ENLIGHT will optimise intelligent systems which, in combination with controls, will fuel new applications, solutions and market uptake.
Ph.D. Vacancies
Current lighting control systems detect motion, but not presence of people in some environment. This results in systems which are not intelligent enough to detect someone working simply at a desk. In addition, nowadays lighting control systems are very coarse in their control options, as they typically only switch on or off all the light in the environment, even if a person is still present in the environment. More advanced sensor systems will supply reliable information as to whether people are present in certain environments and optimize the kind of lighting people require. To reach this goal requires the development of new algorithms that can extract the required information from the sensor data.
The role of the two Ph.D’s within the ENLIGHT project is to develop smart and reliable algorithms for intelligent environmental sensing using current available sensors as well as sensors developed within the ENLIGHT project. One of the Ph.D.’s will use distributed adaptive array signal processing and generalized sampling strategies to improve reliability. The other Ph.D. will use sensor fusion and machine learning techniques based on information theory and Bayesian approaches to improve environmental awareness.
The two Ph.D. vacancies are positioned in the Signal Processing Systems (SPS) group at TU/e. The SPS group is one of the most prominent electrical engineering groups in The Netherlands, with an excellent atmosphere, an outstanding academic reputation (as evidenced, for example, by 5 IEEE Fellowships), and an exceptional utilization track record (as evidenced by numerous patents and by 6 recent spin-out companies).
2 Ph.D. positions at TU-e in ENLIGHT project
