The European Union faces several challenges caused by globalization. Both the delocalization of production plants (leading to more imported products) and the instability characterizing several industrial sectors force economies to re-think their business models and re-adapt them in a new context, where the sustainability of products and processes is more relevant. Within this overall framework, the need to think about innovative business models and industrial strategies, able to answer to these new requirements is mandatory. One chance is the exploitation of digital technologies. Another is the exploitation of secondary (and critical) resources that, currently, are wasted without any recovery. The project FENIX wants to consider both these issues and their potential at the same time, proposing something that could allow Europe to re-appropriate its pertaining position in the global market. The idea is to study innovative business models and industrial strategies (based on the circular economy paradigm) enabling the development of new product-services through the definition of novel supply chains, resulting from an unconventional mix of current ones. This could allow the easy re-use, reconfiguration and modularization of production systems, the exploitation of overcapacity and the renaissance of industrial poles all over the Europe. Furthermore, the circular economy driven business models and industrial strategies proposed by project FENIX will be demonstrated in existing pilot plants, adequately reconfigured and integrated based circular economy needs.

The MarketPlace consortium will utilise state of the art information technologies to build an open web-based integrated Materials Modelling and Collaboration platform that acts as one-stop-shop and open Marketplace for providing all determining components that need to be interwoven for successful and accelerated deployment of materials modelling in industry. This includs linking various activities and databases on models, information on simulation tools, communities, expertise exchange, course and training materials, lectures, seminars and tutorials. The proposed MarketPlace will be a central-hub for all materials modelling related activities in Europe and provide tangible tools to connect disparate modelling, translators, and manufacturing communities to provide a vibrant collaboration web-based tool for the advancement of materials modelling in European manufacturing industry. The developed platform will include mechanisms for the integration of interoperable set of advanced materials model workflows for coupling and linking of various discrete (electronic, atomistic, mesoscopic) and continuum models. This will be achieved by developing open and standard post and pre-processing methods that allow complex flow of information from one model to another for both strongly and loosely coupled systems. The Marketplace platform will include access to concerted set of federated databases of materials models, materials data and provide for access to experimental characterisation and stimulate the development of interface wrappers and open simulation platforms. The MarketPlace consortium aims to strengthen the competitiveness and lower the innovation barrier for European industry for product development and process design and optimization using materials modelling.

The project's overall concept is centred on the scaling up of novel, mass-production nano-manufacturing techniques invented by FAST-SMART partners for synthesis of nano-structured smart materials and component manufacturing for energy harvesting applications to significantly improve the material quality and structural reliability (>50%~100% improvement) and reduce overall materials and processing costs (by 30%) through shortening the process chains and improving material processing efficiency, being focused on less and free rare-element dependence materials (such as lead-free piezoelectric and Hf-free half-Heusler thermoelectric materials) as well as on new energy harvester designs considering environmental strategy, thus to bring about positive, environment-related impacts to Europe (greenhouse gas emission down by 50%, waste reduction by 50%), increased EU’s market share worthy hundreds million Euros initially, and to promote wide implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Single Market (DSM) in Europe, due to introduction of the new energy harvesting products, design and manufacturing services created through the FAST-SMART’s partnership. Current obstacles to the large-scale introduction of energy harvesters that use materials with less rare-element dependence and/or that are toxicity-free are associated largely with inadequate material performance and reliability, high manufacturing cost, and inadequately developed product design strategy addressing needs for sustainable developments. The main driver of the proposal lies in a need to meet challenges particularly for the development and applications of Piezoelectric (PE) and Thermoelectric (TE) materials, associated structures and systems for new-generation energy harvesters, and for dealing with energy generation, storage and uses related issues with a systematic approach, and hence, to help to meet EU’s targets on the social, economic and environmental developments.

This project will focus on the development of technologies and methodologies which have the potential to save costs and time across the whole life cycle of the aircraft (design, production, maintenance, overhaul, repair and retrofit), including for certification aspects. Moreover it will also target the integration of additional functions or materials in structural components of the aircraft, the increased use of automation. The first proposed step is the introduction of the γ-TiAl alloy, a well known promising advanced material for aerospace applications and a revolutionary manufacturing technology. Its specific stiffness and strength, as compared to its low weight, potentially leads to large weight savings (50%), and therefore lower mechanical loads on thermomechanical stressed parts, compared to the common Ni based superalloys. The integration of new material and new manufacturing technology will positively impact several aspects of the manufacturing and maintenance chain, starting from the design, the production, the repair). The aim of this project is twofold: - On one side the work will be focused on the development and integration at industrial of a IPR protected gas atomization process for producing TiAl powders, whose properties must be highly stable from batch to batch. Thanks to the stability of the chemical and granulometric properties of the powders, the application of the Rapid Manufacturing technique to the production of TiAl components will be economically affordable. While this technique is by now well-known, its main drawback resides in the scarce quality of the starting powders. - The other main drawback for the wide industrial application of TiAl components is the integrated optimisation of all the machining steps, that means the setting up of machine tool characteristics and parameters, cutting tool geometry, substrate and coating materials, advanced lubrication technologies.

Nanocomposites are promising for many sectors, as they can make polymers stronger, less water and gas permeable, tune surface properties, add functionalities such as antimicrobial effects. In spite of intensive research activities, significant efforts are still needed to deploy the full potential of nanotechnology in the industry. The main challenge is still obtaining a proper nanostructuring of the nanoparticles, especially when transferring it to industrial scale, further improvements are clearly needed in terms of processing and control. The OptiNanoPro project will develop different approaches for the introduction of nanotechnology into packaging, automotive and photovoltaic materials production lines. In particular, the project will focus on the development and industrial integration of tailored online dispersion and monitoring systems to ensure a constant quality of delivered materials. In terms of improved functionalities, nanotechnology can provide packaging with improved barrier properties as well as repellent properties resulting in easy-to-empty features that will on the one hand reduce wastes at consumer level and, on the other hand, improve their acceptability by recyclers. Likewise, solar panels can be self-cleaning to increase their effectiveness and extend the period between their maintenance and their lifetime by filtering UV light leading to material weathering. In the automotive sector, lightweight parts can be obtained for greater fuel efficiency. To this end, a group of end-user industries from Europe covering the supply and value chain of the 3 target sectors and using a range of converting processes such as coating and lamination, compounding, injection/co-injection and electrospray nanodeposition, supported by selected RTDs and number of technological SMEs, will work together on integrating new nanotechnologies in existing production lines, while also taking into account nanosafety, environmental, productivity and cost-effectiveness issues.