Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and in various industries, such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food and ceramics. Their thermomechanical behaviours are governed by the interactions between solid particles, as well as between particles and the surrounding media (gas or liquid). Although granular materials have been investigated extensively, there are still some unsolved challenging issues concerning the thermomechanical behaviours, including heat generation (i.e. self-heating) and transfer, and thermal effects on material properties and process performance. Furthermore, the unique thermomechanical attributes have led to emerging applications with granular materials, such as additive manufacturing, powder coating, high quality composites, insulation and efficient thermal processing for energy conservation, but there is a lack of mechanistic understanding of thermomechanical behaviour of granular materials in these emerging applications. MATHEGRAM will hence deliver a timely, concerted research and training programme to address these challenges, bringing together a multi-disciplinary and inter-sectorial consortium consisting of 6 leading academic institutes, 4 non-academic beneficiaries and 6 partner organisations from 8 EU member states. Our vision is to develop robust new numerical models and novel experimental techniques that can predict and characterise heat generation and transfer, as well as thermal effects in granular materials. The enhanced mechanistic understanding of granular materials will enable them to be used in diverse industries, while also achieving energy conservation and CO2 emission reduction. We will also train a cohort of 15 ESRs with balanced gender, who will be the next generation scientific and technological leaders with competency and the research and transferable skills to work effectively across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries.

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.

Granular materials such as sand, salt grains and coffee beans are everywhere. Predicting how granular materials flow and deform is obviously important for a wide range of sectors, yet still a highly challenging task. Computational methods to assist in handling granular materials have greatly improved in the past decades. However, these computational methods need more and more experimental calibration. Current calibration technology is completely insufficient to provide the required information to calibrate computational methods. CALIPER will train a cohort of experimental and computational experts by letting them develop and use innovative granular calibration technology based on three dimensional imaging methods. CALIPER training is provided by leading academics and an exciting mix of large and small European companies and will make use state-of-the-art experimental infrastructure. CALIPER will so provide Europe with a unique group of professionals that will enhance the academic and industrial innovation capacity in a wide range of sectors for years to come.

The goal of the project ZEOCAT-3D is the development of a new bi-functional (two types of active centers) structured catalysts, achieving for the first time a tetramodal pore size distribution (micro-, meso1-, meso2-, macro-porous) and high dispersion of metal active sites for the conversion of methane, coming from different sources as natural gas and biogas, into high value chemicals such as aromatics (benzene, naphthalene, among others) via methane dehydroaromatization (MDA). The main drawbacks associated with this process are: Low methane conversion, low selectivity towards the desired products and the quickly deactivation due to carbon deposition onto catalyst. These problems will be overcome by the use of hierarchical zeolites structures synthetized by 3D-printing and loaded with doped molybdenum nano-oxides. The methodology of the project will go from laboratory to pilot scale demonstration in a real environment. Catalyst design and operation conditions will be optimized for different methane feedstock at lab-scale and then upscaling and construction of a final prototype will be carried out. The optimisation of these catalytic processes will bring enormous advantages for increasing the exploitation of natural gas and biogas, since ZEOCAT-3D is very well in accordance with the programme topic NMBP-24, regarding development industrial process to obtain high value chemicals at the same time that the dependence from the current fossil fuel is reduced.