The main goal of the LORCENIS project is to develop long reinforced concrete for energy infrastructures with lifetime extended up to a 100% under extreme operating conditions. The concept is based on an optimal combination of novel technologies involving customized methodologies for cost-efficient operation. 4 scenarios of severe operating conditions are considered: 1. Concrete infrastructure in deep sea, arctic and subarctic zones: Offshore windmills, gravity based structures, bridge piles and harbours 2. Concrete and mortar under mechanical fatigue in offshore windmills and sea structures 3. Concrete structures in concentrated solar power plants exposed to high temperature thermal fatigue 4. Concrete cooling towers subjected to acid attack The goal will be realized through the development of multifunctional strategies integrated in concrete formulations and advanced stable bulk concretes from optimized binder technologies. A multi-scale show case will be realized towards service-life prediction of reinforced concretes in extreme environments to link several model approaches and launch innovation for new software tools. The durability of sustainable advanced reinforced concrete structures developed will be proven and validated within LORCENIS under severe operating conditions based on the TRL scale, starting from a proof of concept (TRL 3) to technology validation (TRL 5). LORCENIS is a well-balanced consortium of multidisciplinary experts from 9 universities and research institutes and 7 industries whose 2 are SMEs from 8 countries who will contribute to training by exchange of personnel and joint actions with other European projects and increase the competitiveness and sustainability of European industry by bringing innovative materials and new methods closer to the marked and permitting the establishment of energy infrastructures in areas with harsh climate and environmental conditions at acceptable costs.

The H-HOPE project addresses the development and demonstration of innovative and sustainable energy harvesting systems capable of recovering hidden hydro energy from existing piping systems, open streams and open channels. This new technology is based on both the use of piezoelectric materials attached to submerged bodies with deforming walls and of electromagnetic regulators absorbing the transverse motion of oscillating bodies inside flows. The power density of the proposed energy harvesters will be significantly improved thanks to the multi-physics design approach and to the innovative adaptive power take-off (PTO) allowing to tune the resonance frequency of the coupled fluid-structure-electrical system and thus increase the flow induced vibrations under lock-in conditions. Eight (8) different case studies representative of actual industrial water facilities and free-flowing streams located across Europe will be used to experimentally test and validate the effectiveness of the technology in adequate and real operating conditions reproduced in laboratories. In parallel, numerical models will be developed and included in a multi-physics design strategy so as to optimize their design whereas an adaptive PTO will be developed and customize on the energy harvesting system so as to maximize the performance even in variable operating conditions. The assessment of the environmental and socio-economic impacts will be used to demonstrate the value of the selected case studies and the sustainability of the proposed technology aimed also at increasing the resilience of the water facilities. In order to extend this knowledge and promote the applications of the H-HOPE technologies to potential prosumers, an open-access and open-source do-it-yourself platform will be set up. As a result, the H-HOPE platform will certainly contribute to reduce the negative effects of the climate change and to reduce the CO2 emissions while increasing the energy independence of the EU.

Artificial-Intelligence-Augmented Cooling System for Small Data Centres “ECO-Qube”; is a holistic management system which aims to enhance energy efficiency and cooling performance by orchestrating both hardware and software components in edge computing applications. ECO-Qube is a data driven approach which utilizes valuable unused data from active data centre components. Created big data is being used by an artificial intelligence augmented system which detects cooling and energy requirements instantaneously. ECO-Qube differentiates from conventional cooling systems which keep operating temperatures within a strict interval and do not evaluate measurable cooling performance. Unmeasured cooling performance leads underperformed airflow, thermal disequilibrium, and high energy consumption. On the contrary, ECO-Qube offers a zonal heat management system which benefits from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations to adapt cooling system for the best airflow and cooling performance with minimum energy consumption. Moreover, ECO-Qube realizes smart workload orchestration to keep the CPUs at their most energy efficient state and maintain the thermal equilibrium to reduce overheating risk. Sustainability is another priority for ECO-Qube’s smart energy management system (EMS), which is designed to track the energy demand and operate the energy supply in cooperation with building/district’s EMS. This synergy maximizes the energy supplied from renewable energy sources and minimizes the energy supplied from sources with big carbon footprint. ECO-Qube solution will be assessed in three different pilots from different climatic conditions to validate energy efficiency under different external variables.