On 2 October 2015, the last out of fourteen chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) protection projects within the Joint Investment Programme CBRN (JIP CBRN) was signed by Henk Geveke, Director TNO Defence and Security, on behalf of the consortium, and Rini Goos, Deputy Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency (EDA).
The signatures give way to the project “RACED”, which aims at enhancement of decontamination (DECON) procedures of material or equipment exposed to chemical or biological warfare agents. It will focus on a scientific and technological consideration of the complex question of “how clean is clean enough?”
The “RACED" project will assess DECON procedures and, finally, will result in a prototype of a tool that shall assist operational commanders in minimizing the after-decontamination exposure risk, and assist them in making decisions on the assessment of the sufficient level of DECON, remaining hazards in terms of exposure to human beings and necessity of taking additional steps.
“RACED” will be conducted by a consortium led by TNO from the Netherlands with partners coming from four more Member States and Norway: FFI (Norway), ITQB (Portugal) LBDB (Portugal), ACMIT (Austria), ADL (Austria), RMA (Belgium) and SUJCHBO (Czech Republic). The project is one of fourteen projects under the EDA Joint Investment Programme CBRN protection (JIP-CBRN), set up as Category A programme and funded by twelve Member States plus Norway with almost 12 million euro budget. It serves as an EDA contribution for the European Framework Cooperation, a joint effort of the European Commission and the EDA on maximising synergies between civilian and defence-related research activities.
The JIP-CBRN Programme Arrangement was signed in March 2012 on the ministerial level and two calls for proposals were conducted in 2012 and 2013, covering various Research &Technology projects within the CBRN area, such as: stand-off detection for chemical agents, point detection of biological agents, unknown samples handling, modelling & simulation of CBRN architectures, decontamination, protection equipment and sensor networking. With seven projects initiated within the first call frame, one has already been accomplished. This year, the “Biotype” project successfully ended with a demonstrator device with an integrated biosensor for point detection of airborne bio-threats based on anti-body lab on a chip technology.
More information: