Humanity is approaching a cornerstone where Climate Change will transform society, industry and economy. Therefore, moving away from inefficient energy consumption and fossil fuels is more urgent than ever. Renewable energy sources are growing fast but their full integration will make necessary not just a boost of their efficiency but rather a quantum leap in energy management. Such paradigm change will come from technologies adaptable to changing climate conditions and, importantly, making use of widely available non-critical materials. ADAPTATION vision is to challenge current paradigms in solar energy harvesting and their integration by developing a new solar material platform that will integrate thermal management and energy collection in a single material, reducing electricity peak profile and allowing easy adaptation of the energy harvesting properties to different climate conditions. For this purpose, we will take inspiration from the two most efficient energy management processes on Earth: photosynthesis and terrestrial radiative cooling. ADAPTATION will mimic simultaneously the strategies followed by plants during photosynthesis to collect and manage energy at the nanoscale and the power-free radiative cooling of Earth by thermal regulation at the microscale. These extraordinary energy collection and managing strategies are robust to disorder and provide self-regulatory cooling capacities which make them ideal to be integrated into a wide spectrum of physical objects, powering them with a sustainable energy source. In ADAPTATION we will develop the building blocks for this technology and will demonstrate its implementation with two sustainable novel device architectures. Our innovative vision is based on the multidisciplinary background of its consortium with experts in geosciences, polaritonic photonics, colloidal and supramolecular chemistry, materials engineering, quantum technologies or photovoltaics including high-tech industrial implementation.

QLUSTER is constituted as a collaborative network for advancing research in fundamentals and applications, training ESRs with broad skillsets and high adaptability to the increasingly knowledge-based economy of the EU, and with a strong commitment to communicating science to society. Despite similarities in phenomena, language and methods employed to study clustering and mesophase organization across widely different length scales — from subatomic to macromolecular — a coherent effort to bring distinct communities in classical and quantum soft matter together has not been yet undertaken. Our objective is to advance the fundamentals in such fields far beyond the state of the art, cross-fertilizing and creating permanent ties between communities that have evolved separately so far, and fostering the transfer of knowledge essential for a broad range of applications. The ambitious research and training programme will address the properties of classical and quantum soft matter systems under a common framework based on the underlying ultrasoft interactions of the constituents. Ultrasoftness is the key factor leading to the observed complexity in the dynamics, structure, and response to external drives of these different entities (complex polymers, soft colloids, Rydberg atoms in optical lattices, vortex matter in superconductors, etc). QLUSTER comprises a unique theory/experiment balanced team of specialists in quantum optics, polymer physics and macromolecular chemistry among others, providing a valuable platform for communication between the different communities of research in ultrasoft matter. The impact in the academic and private sector of the EU will be broad. There are no previous examples of similar initiatives in the world and QLUSTER will put the EU in a privileged position, through fostering transfer of fundamentals and methods, to innovate in large-scale sectors as e.g., tyre manufacturing, and to find innovative applications of quantum science.

T2DMOF is targeted at offering an extremely skilled and promising emerging researcher with a PhD in Organic Chemistry and an outstanding track record a highest quality training through research in the cross-disciplinary, supra-sectoral, and burgeoning field of 2D electronic materials by developing a green solution to address the global challenge of energy generation. Thermoelectric generators can convert temperature differences directly into electrical voltages via the Seebeck effect. However, the currently used thermoelectric materials (inorganic/conducting polymers) have critical drawbacks, as they contain highly toxic elements, require high micro/nanofabrication costs, display limited stability, etc. T2DMOF aims to develop a novel class of two-dimensional conjugated metal–organic frameworks (2D c-MOFs) to overcome the above-mentioned challenges in conventional thermoelectric materials, while proposing reliable structure–property relationships to guide the design of next-generation MOF-based thermoelectric materials. The diversity of 2D c-MOF synthesis methods (film/powder) enables planar flexible or columnar array thermoelectric generators to be realized in view of different practical application scenarios. T2DMOF’s overall objective is to train the fellow to become a mature and independent top scientist and to prepare him for a leading position in academia or industry in Europe.

The overall aim of the DORADO project is to improve safety and efficiency in nuclear decommissioning by applying digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Building Information Models (BIM) with a dedicated decommissioning ontology. In DORADO, a holistic digital platform based on a data-driven approach will be created, integrating digital tools into a coherent suite customized for decommissioning applications. Once completed, the platform can be utilized especially for in situ waste characterization, planning segregation and packing remotely, robotics and remote handling systems, sampling and clearance of surfaces and structures, cost estimation, risk identification and knowledge management, including on-site voice assistance to the fieldworkers. DORADO will focus on eight technologies that will be developed and integrated to be used with a common data server combining the data flow into a BIM model. These include, e.g., point-cloud 3D models and change detection, digital twins based ALARA dose estimation, robot mission optimization and smart voice assistant interface. After the development phase, all the results will be demonstrated with data sets collected from real nuclear facilities. An end-user group is involved throughout the project, to ensure matching a market need. Main impacts are achieved by minimizing radiation exposure and risk of occupational incidents to workers and increasing the efficiency of decommissioning planning by enabling remote operations and planning. This can result in significant cost reduction and optimized waste management strategies as well as increase the public confidence towards nuclear energy. Benchmarking digital tools with demonstrations from nuclear facilities also assists the regulators to understand the technical potential and to update regulations to cover all the changes in the operating environment.

Almost half of the production costs in the rapidly growing chiral chemicals market is spent on the downstream processing costs due to challenging separation tasks and demanding levels of purification. FUNAMBULIST aims at a radically new science-enabled production of fine chemicals by emulating the ingenuity of biological processes in an engineered environment. In this way, FUNAMBULIST aims at overcoming the current dogma that fine chemicals are produced via traditional synthetic routes in organic solvents. FUNAMBULIST creates a modular toolkit that enables a radically different approach to design chemical reactions in the fine chemicals market by abandoning the current, artificial gap between biological and chemical function.