Global warming resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases has received widespread attention with international action from governments and industries, including a number of collaborative programs, such as SET-Plan, and very recently the International Climate Change hold 2015 in Paris. Key European Commission roadmaps towards 2030 and 2050 have identified Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a central low-carbon technology to achieve the EU’s 2050 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction objectives, although there still remains a great deal to be done in terms of embedding CCS in future policy frameworks. The selective capture and storage of CO2 at low cost in an energy-efficient is a world-wide challenge. One of the most promising technologies for CO2 capture is adsorption using solid sorbents, with the most important advantage being the energy penalty reduction during capture and regeneration of the material compared to liquid absorption. The key objectives of GRAMOFON projects are: (i) to develop and protoype a new energy and cost-competitive dry separation process for post-combustion CO2 capture based on innovative hybrid porous solids Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and Graphene Oxide nanostructures. (ii) to optimize the CO2 desorption process by means of Microwave Swing Desorption (MSD) and Joule effect, that will surpass the efficiency of the conventional heating procedures. This innovative concept will be set up by world key players expert in synthesis, adsorption, characterization and modelling, as well as process design and economic projections.

Power supply and carbon-intensive industries account for a large share of CO2 emissions. Shifting towards a low-carbon economy requires cost-effective carbon capture solutions to be developed, tested and deployed. Current solutions do not offer sufficient performances. Adsorption processes are promising alternatives for capturing CO2 from power plants and other energy intensive industries as cement, steel, or petrochemical industries. In this regard, Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a widely studied class of porous adsorbents that offer tremendous potential, owing to their large CO2 adsorption capacity and high CO2 affinity. However, the performances of MOF-based carbon capture technologies have not been fully evaluated. MOF4AIR gathers 14 partners from 8 countries to develop and demonstrate the performances of MOF-based CO2 capture technologies in power plants and energy intensive industries. After identifying the best MOFs in WP1 and validating them through tests (e.g. stability and selectivity) in WP2, the most promising will be produced at larger scale and shaped in WP3. WP4 will conduct simulations to study MOFs behaviours in two adsorption processes: VPSA and MBTSA and optimise them. Both solutions will be tested at lab scale in WP5. In WP6, 3 demonstration sites across Europe will prove the cost-efficiency and reliability of MOF-based carbon capture in CO2 intensive sectors: power supply, refineries and waste incineration. To ensure a wide development of the solutions developed, WP7 will focus on techno-economic analysis, LCA and WP8 on social acceptance and replicability. MOF4AIR aims to foster the uptake of CCS technologies by providing a TRL6-reliable solution matching end users' needs, notably by cutting CCS energy penalty by more than 10%. The solutions developed will be highly replicable thanks to the consideration of a wide range of carbon intensive sectors and clusters, notably through the project's Industrial Cluster Board.

The SABYDOMA programme addresses developments in the safety by design (SbD) paradigm by examining four industrial case studies in detail where the TRLs will advance from 4 to 6. Each TRL activity will progress from being lab based at TRL4 to being industry based at TRL6. The TRL4 activity will involve only innovation with regular industrial communication whereas the TRL6 activity will involve industrially located activities with innovation communication. One of the novel themes of this study is to use system control and optimisation theory including the Model Predictive Control (MPC) philosophy to bind the whole subject of SbD from laboratory innovation to the industrial production line and from decision making processes to project governance. An equally important innovative step is the building of high throughput online platforms where nanomaterial (NM) is manufactured and screened at the point of production. The screening signal controls the NM redesign and production in a feedback loop. Screens will involve (a) physiochemical sensing elements (b) in-vitro targets of increasing complexity from the 2D biomembrane to cell-line and more complex cell-line elements; and, (c) multiple in-vitro targets with multiple end-points; developed in current H2020 projects. Two of the industrial studies include composite coating manufacture where the coating’s stability and toxicity will be tested using a flow through microfluidic flow cell system coupled to online screens. This is part of the release and ageing investigations on the NM and NM coatings and the results of these will feed back to the production line design. At every step on the TRL ladder the in-silico modelling will be applied to optimise and redefine the relevant activities. By the same token regulatory and governance principles of SbD will be used to refine the technological development. The final deliverable will be four distinct technologies applying SbD to the four industrial processes respectively.