Valve for Inerting Sytem with Termal ACtuator. The present proposal, called VISTAC, offers cooperation between GDTech, highll skilled company in the field of simulation of thermal, fluid and muliphysics behavior of aeronautical equipment and Equip’Aero TECHNIQUE, recognized design and production organization for aircraft fluid management equipment including innovative solutions. This strong partnership combines expertise in all required fields and experienced practice in working-in and managing research projects. These elements are a guarantee of VISTAC success. A low weight, low cost, high reliability and maintenability optimized multiposition valve will be developped for the needs of future generation of halon free fire extinguishing systems using a common On Board Inert Gas Generation (OBIGGS) with the fuel tank inerting system. State of the art knowledge of the partners in valves technologies will be associated with the development of a new generation of electromechanical actuator using thermal effects. Heat generated by electrical signal is converted into mechanical force and stroke by the mean of Shape Memory Alloys elements or thermostatic wax elements developped in the ATHT project already ongoing in Equip’Aero Technique R&T department. Valve developed will be maturated to TRL6 and will be ready for manufacturing to MRL6. Topic leader and partners may then be able to propose to further certification an optimized fire exitinguishing system with reduced environmental fooprint incorporating a smart multiposition valve. EU industrials and environment shall greatly benefit from this study, thanks to a strong dissemination plan and a wide communication strategy.

Safran Helicopter Engines has recently developed and patented a new spinning combustion technology (SCT). This innovative technology improves ignition and blow-off capabilities and enables combustor weight reduction, without compromising turbine nor combustor lifetime. To further promote this highly promising technology, the next step is to assess SCT performances in terms of NOx and soot emissions. Indeed, new aeronautical technologies entering the market today must comply with international regulations and answer the public environmental concern about global warming and human health. To assist Safran in this development phase, the LOOPS project aims to design, manufacture, test and model an advanced low-NOx and low soot/particles injection system for SCT. The technology is based on the multi-point injection concept, which has already demonstrated very good low-NOx capabilities. The challenge is to guarantee low soot emission as well, which may be detrimental to other pollutant reduction. Two injectors will be designed and evaluated in a systematic way for both NOx and soot emission using combined measurements and numerical simulation. On the experimental side, the most advanced experimental diagnostics will be used, providing in particular and for the first time a complete and detailed characterization of the soot particles with their concentration and size distribution. On the numerical side, a significant contribution of LOOPS will be the assessment and application of accurate models for NOx and soot production in real helicopter engines. The confrontation of measurements and simulation results will allow to evaluate the accuracy of the numerical approach and to better understand the underlying mechanisms of pollutant emissions. In addition to a new low-emission injector systems for SCT, outputs of the project will be guiding rules, as well as an engineering numerical tool for low-emission SCT, allowing to find the best compromise between competing phenomena.

The ANR project ARROW deals with the technological problems that limit the productivity of robots when used for some industrial applications and with the validation of theoretical results by experimental tests. These applications require a very good accuracy and high acceleration capacities. ARROW is the continuation of the ANR project “Objectif 100g” and is part of the EquipEx, named RobotEx. Up to now, robot designers are constrained to choose between rapidity OR accuracy. This is due to the fact that on the one hand, high accelerations lead to physical phenomena that decrease the accuracy and, on the other hand, accurate machines are generally heavy and, as a result, quite slow. However, very fast and very accurate robots would lead to a productivity improvement for some applications such as laser cutting and microelectronics assembly. This is the main motivation of the project ARROW. The objective of ARROW is to design and manufacture robots that are able to reach 20g of acceleration with an absolute accuracy of 20µm in a parallelepipedic workspace of edge equal to 1m. Two main research axes, that are not separated, are defined: 1. Robot design: this axis focuses on the synthesis of new robot architectures, their evaluation at the preliminary design stage, the optimisation of their dimensions using their elastostatic, dynamic and elastodynamic models and on the final drawings. 2. Advanced control: this axis focuses on the determination of control laws to take advantage of the best performances of the designed robots in order to reach the required acceleration and accuracy. It should be mentioned that axes 1 and 2 are not decoupled. As a matter of fact, “control oriented” criterions will be defined for the robots dimension synthesis and control laws will be developed with regards to the chosen architectures. The main technological limitation that ARROW will contribute to solve concerns the definition of solutions for designing and controlling robots able to obtain the two antagonistic performances: rapidity and accuracy. The main associated scientific limitations that we will have to solve are: - the preliminary design of robots able to fulfil the design requirements. A this design step, there is no mathematical model for robots and a few quantitative performance criteria. Consequently, new indices will be proposed. - the definition of models, few time-consuming but able to give accurate results for the design stage and the robot control. - the optimal trajectory planning in order to minimize the vibrations. - the synthesis of an advanced control approach that will be able to optimally control the robot displacements. The three partners have complementary skills useful to succeed in ARROW project. The IRCCyN members are well-known for their research works on modelling and identification of robots as well as on the type-synthesis and analysis of robot architectures. The LIRMM members are also well-known in the robotic field and have a very good experience in robot design and control. Tecnalia is a R&D centre and have been working on parallel architectures for more than 25 years. This technological centre has shown through numerous research projects in collaboration with university parters that it is a complementary partner able to accelerate the academic developments and help them reach the industrial market. Finally, during the ARROW project, theoretical and experimental results on the design of fast and accurate robots will be developed. The experiments will highlight the most significant results in the domain of high-speed robotics and will help the technological transfer in this field.

The research project EXPRESSO aims to design lossy microwave filters for future wireless home-networks. With the increasing demand of new services, devices for mobile communications and home-networking integrate more and more standards, and therefore in order to maintain signal integrity of the various embedded systems, very narrow band filters using high quality factor (Q) resonators are highly required. Generally, the design and implementation of such filters require a compromise between, on one hand, the electrical performances (in term of insertion loss, bandwidth, and selectivity), and on the other hand, the cost, weight and volume. Indeed, filter performances depend straightly on resonator Q factor, the higher Q the better performances. However, high Q means also high cost and high volume which are far to be compatible with what mass market devices require. Consequently, other approaches should be found out for future radio communication systems which aim to exploit efficiently the spectrum resource (operating in more and more narrow bandwidths) and which will require low-cost and ultra-selective filters to this end. The alternate solution proposed in this project consists in using low-cost technologies required for mass production devices, while compensating the resulting filter insertion losses within the system. This solution, called “lossy filters”, is considered as emerging and is not yet exploited in the context of home-networking. The idea is to distribute the losses within the filter structure in order to keep the electrical performances (in terms of in-band flatness and rejection steepness) and, since a counterpart is necessary, to increase the absolute level of losses. This approach remains possible if the system is able to compensate for the losses by re-designing the RF front-end architecture in this respect. The research project EXPRESSO contains 3 main lines: • The identification of suitable RF architectures for home-networking communication systems that will compensate for the amount of losses inherent to “lossy filters”, • The development of appropriate method (and tool) for the synthesis of lossy filters within the particular context of low-cost technologies used in wireless home-networks, • The design and implementation of such filters including dissipative elements within the same drastic constraints. The research project EXPRESSO is a fundamental research program and is relevant to the topic #4: “components for communication”. The research topics intend to bring out new solutions that will enable to exploit more effectively the frequency spectrum. In the future, such filters, considered as key-components in communication systems, will take a strategic role in the design of electronic equipments including multiple radios. Also, the efficient usage of spectral resources will contribute to the development of new services with better quality.