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Scaleup Vlaanderen, the leading growth program by Agoria and Sirris, is evolving into Scaleup Flanders. With new partners Vlerick Business School and VITO, the programme is getting a fresh boost: its focus is expanding to include cleantech, and the range of services is significantly growing, allowing even more ambitious companies to be supported.

VITO spin-off Blue Foot Membranes has taken home the gold in the ‘Impact Delivered’ category at the EARTO Innovation Awards. This continues the trend set in previous years when we won bronze with Carbstone and silver with Unifly.

Since it was founded in 2017, iFLUX has been offering solutions for determining the dynamics of groundwater flow and pollution in the soil. It does so based on innovative measurement technology combined with a targeted data analysis. These identify the speed and direction of groundwater and the pollution it contains using flux measurements. Today, this is mainly analogue (the pollutant fluxes are determined in monitoring tubes through adsorption and recovery processes, from which the effective fluxes in the soil are then extrapolated), but the ability to do this digitally too (remotely and in real-time) is a recent development.

Electrification is a necessity as a means of replacing fossil fuels. But for that, we need batteries, and batteries are still the weak link. After all, they contain critical raw materials that need recycling to be sustainable. The ACROBAT consortium has therefore been exploring techniques to enable lithium iron phosphate batteries, or LFP batteries for short, to be recycled effectively.

Having been commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA), VITO has developed a monitoring tool that can identify agricultural activities (the growing of specific crops but also measures such as irrigation) down to the level of individual fields. The WorldCereal tool covers the entire planet, and the maps it generates can be updated every growing season - which is a first.

The remote sensing experts at VITO are increasingly working on a global scale. At the end of 2021, they finalised a new world cover map in the context of the ESA-WorldCover project. The level of detail and precision of the map were unprecedented. The WorldCover map was created based on images from Sentinel 1 and 2, two satellites that are part of the European Earth observation programme Copernicus.

With ATMO-Flow, VITO developed a model framework based on Computational Fluid Dynamics, a technology that uses computer simulations to analyse airflows. This led to the creation of a unique 3D wind flow map of the entire territory of the city of Antwerp (9 by 9 km²). It brings a detailed picture of the city's air quality challenges down to 1 metre. The model also provides precise insights into wind comfort at all locations in the city, the impact of wind on the urban climate and the potential of wind turbines in the city.