Product design for circularity and new circular business models. 

• Integration of information flows throughout the product lifecycle improve knowledge for re-development & re-design of products that can be returned for further re-use which will better enable circularity,
• Develop methods and strategies for efficient reuse, refurbishment or remanufacturing instead of recycling, especially for products with short life time (also due to technology advancement)

• To reduce environmental pressure according to the directives, Europe must develop a new way of evaluating and quantifying the impacts, especially of emerging technologies
• The patents represent an industrial vision of technological forecasting and innovation to be monitored and considered during eco-design
• Developing new tools based on artificial intelligence can speed up patent analysis, considering many more documents to improve the significance of the results

Perspectives and mobility sector needs

Materials:

• Ultra Light weight (Magnesium alloys, AM high strength Aluminium alloys)
• Lattice structures and FGMs
• MMCs (Metal Matrix Composities)
• Recycled materials (FR-Thermoplastics from by products)
• Materials qualification

Electrical machines

• Development of Rare-Earth-Free Electrical Machine for increasing sustainability without compromising performance and reliability
  • Reduced dependence on foreign markets
  • Eliminate exploitation of poor countries’ miners
• High flux density and low core loss soft magnetic alloys
  • Improve efficiency through losses reduction
  • Achieve compact and light-weight design (high-power density)

Sensors/sensing devices

• Design and integration of wearable and wireless sensors for environmental and performance monitoring: Sensing network extension for enhanced data collection
• Design of nanoscale CMOS chips for analog and digital signal processing:  Promote and support sensing device miniaturization

Transportation economics and policies

• Development of a clear pathway toward decarbonization of the transport industry
  • Identification of critical technologies to develop
  • Evaluation of various technological opportunities, economic impacts on both users and companies

Design an open and inclusive productive system by promoting:

• collaborative and interconnected models,
• cross-disciplinary and open research infrastructures,
• access to new technologies towards a society 5.0,
• and the innovation of processes, products, and services, to support regional intelligence and human capital.

Interrelated challenge: design & materials & manufacturing – no time to learn, design for productivity

From product to process data inspection, modelling, monitoring and control

Holistic, integrated view on product-process-production (3Ps) 

There are different initiatives and standards to support efficient manufacturing. However, exchange of information is still slow.

Integration of information flows throughout the product lifecycle can help 

• to improve productivity and allow efficient development of new products.
• to address bigger challenges such as circularity, including re-manufacturing, re-design and re-use.

Improvements for any of those „3Ps“ (product-process-production) requires to establish and analyze relations to other two 'P's'

Example: A single mechanically or/and electrically defective joint can compromise the performance of an entire battery pack which includes hundreds of them. Inspecting each one individually is not efficient neither possible.

Robotics and Automation: Consider non-rigid materials.

Structural weight reduction of transports manufacturing of light composite parts, upscaling , part functionalisation to reduce assembly and create smart parts for SHM (Structural Health Monitoring)

Support the development of equipment (TRL3-TRL5)

• Components and subsystems (for Hydrogen, electric vehicles, hybrid grids)
• Materials: sustainability / recyclability /multifunctional
• Process–digitalisation/automation (competitiveness)

Pave the way to industrialization (TRL6-TRL8) –PRIVATE-PUBLIC partnerships

Manufacturing for green products and technologies:

• Up to four-fifths of a product’s lifetime emissions are determined by decisions made at the design stage
• Most of the green choices on product materials, design and performance should be abandoned or need an impressive amount of R&D in manufacturing

New manufacturing solutions for a new generation of complex products for:

• Lightweight
• Thermo-mech
• metamaterial
• multimaterial
• First-time-right

Energy sector:

• Additive Manufacturing
• Powder Processing
• Sensors

(For recycling and lean processes)

Automotove, Aerospace, Railway: Potential topics (about polymer composites manufacturing)

• Development of in-situ monitoring (i.e. process-induced defects detection) technology for high production rate or high performance product manufacturing processes (e.g. filament winding, compression RTM, Carbon/PAEK AFP)
• Development of numerical models to predict the generation of defects during the manufacturing process and assess their influence on the quality or residual lifetime of a final product, (and eventually determine the tolerance of the defects), in order to reach “zero-waste” manufacturing
• Development of digital twin to establish white box or gray box models via data science, in order to reduce the computational time for numerical simulation and real-time optimization of manufacturing processes

• reshoring Europe’s competitive manufacturing: exploiting digitalization in full sustainable product development taking product design from master-slave to peer-to-peer requires novel methodologies and models
• how to support European industry in the transition from the old to the new (infra, business, people)

Aircraft developments: 

• Advanced air mobility
• Electric propulsion
• Hydrogen-powered propulsion
• Application of novel materials and manufacturing concepts

Sustainability objectives less dominated by operation

Challenge for MiE: innovative Transport needs integrated balance between

• Sustainable manufacturing objectives
• Sustainable operation objectives
• Other specific requirements (e.g, for safety)

Recovering and preserving the European leadership in strategic and high value added products -
Renewable energy generation and storage and critical machinery components

• Energy transition will create many new areas of application for batteries.
• Step from cutting edge research to industrial implementation necessary for a competitive battery ecosystem.
• More European players producing cells of sufficient quality with low costs in large scale are needed.
• Without natural local competitive advantages (low electricity costs), a strong political will is needed to make battery production competitive

Decarbonization:

• Circularity applied to the Batteries domain (second life / recycling)
  • Circularity by design
  • Automation (in production, considering Circularity as part of manufacturing)
  • Automation (in the reusing and dismantling phase)
  • Management of CRM
• On-purpose vehicles
  • Small volume automation
  • Customization
• Components
• H2 (Fuel Cell and direct use)
  • Scaling-up production (automation)

Autonomous Driving / ADAS:

• Sensors
  • electronics manufacturing (big numbers, big automation)

Increasing complexity of cyber-physical systems (CPS), new concepts for production are required to achieve new product features

Link materials, design and manufacturing.

The OPTIMAL platform will be validated through the manufacturing of master tools for four different use cases: a) full-polymer micro lenses for industrial optics, b) hierarchical multifunctional drag reduction riblet structures for aviation, c) free-form lens arrays for high-end virtual reality displays and d) microfluidic hierarchical structures for lab on chip medical devices.The OPTIMAL consortium consists of three research institutes (JOR, ISE, ILC), one university (UPR), member of the Italian Photonics Association, three Small Medium Enterprises (MRT, DPX, HYP), two big industries, leaders in their corresponding market (SDA and BCD).