Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a material joining technique that is a major breakthrough due to its substantial advantages compared to other techniques for welding aluminum alloys. This has allowed aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing to achieve 60% cost saving and reduce manufacturing time by 73% in aircraft models. This is only a fraction of what could be achieved. Despite its merits, FSW use is still limited due to a certain defect termed “kissing bond”. Kissing bonds reduce the stress-load resilience of FSW materials and are extremely difficult to detect. Thus, out of fear of low fatigue performance, aerospace and automotive manufacturers cannot leverage FSW to its full potential which translates to manufacturing cost savings of €1.6 billion, fuel savings of €1.9 billion and a reduction of 2 million tons of CO2, during the next 20 years. This gap gives rise to a unique business opportunity which Vermon (developer of nonlinear ultrasonic transducers) and RISE (expert in signal processing algorithms), IKH (high-tech SME specializing in human-machine interfaces and service robotics) along with Coskunoz (leader in FSW machinery with commercial presence in 4 continents) seek to seize with the aid of TWI (world class research institute who originally invented FSW) by commercializing FrictionHarmonics. FrictionHarmonics is the fruit of four years of R&D financed by private funds and public grants. It has already been validated in a relevant environment and is proved to detect kissing bonds of less than 0.3mm in diameter with 100% accuracy. We now need to finalize the system’s commercial version, certify it, and validate its performance in a complete FSW production line. Our primary target customers will be aerospace and automotive manufacturers in Europe and North America. To this end, we request a grant of €2.2m. Our aim is to grow our businesses by €33.44m in gross cumulative revenue, operating at a profit of €13.83m and generating 215 new jobs over the 5 years after market launch.

Over 50% global oil and gas is produced by offshore assets beyond midpoint of their design lives. 50% all asset failures related to technical integrity are due to ageing (MARS). Ageing assets therefore represent major hazards for offshore oil and gas personnel, the environment and the society. Europe accounted for 28% reported major accident loss of containment from 1980 to 2006, with 11 fatalities, 183 injuries & >€170M economic loss (HSE). The recent crude oil price drop is forcing oil and gas operators to increasingly focus on extending lifespan of existing offshore assets (above design life), as oppose to asset replacement. Assuring assets integrity and safety of personnel, environment & society also remains a top priority. 2016 oil and gas industry report concluded that new asset inspection technologies could generate €1bn p.a. for the sector. We timely propose to finalize a unique and first commercial system (ASPIRE) which combines & automates: asset inspection; inspection data analyses; and maintenance scheduling. The system will inspect & report maintenance schedules for critical assets (e.g. well conductor) within 1 day at cost of €4K. Current industry standard and state-of-the-art methods are fragmented: inspection companies generate large amounts of data manually, which is time-consuming (e.g. 5 days for well conductor), extremely risky (access hazardous environments without prior sound knowledge of asset status) and expensive. Inspection data is then passed to data analyses firm for interpretation/reporting (+5 days), followed by maintenance planning (+5 days), costing >€20K for the whole process for a 100m/24 well conductor. ASPIRE combines these 3 Steps in 1. It reduces inspection and maintenance scheduling time (1 day vs 15 days/well conductor) and cost (€4K vs >€20K). ASPIRETM will generate €49.5M revenue & €24.7M gross profit for SME-led consortium within 5 years (2019-2023),i.e. 10:1 ROI for EC grant, creating 62 new consortium jobs in the process.

The purpose of this action is to assist the €2.8bn European and global liquid storage and distribution industry in reducing the costs involved in ensuring that leaks do not occur from 500,000 above ground storage tanks (ASTs), thus avoiding avoid damage to the environment and the loss of revenue from the unscheduled outages of leaking tanks, currently estimated at €132m. At its core is the exploitation of Plant Integrity’s proven non-invasive storage tank floor monitoring technology capable of detecting defects as small as 25mm. Plant Integrity’s SafeAST system provides continuous structural condition monitoring of ASTs, detecting any corrosion hotspots in the internal tank floor without the need to empty the tank and manually inspect the welds. Plant Integrity provides this continuous monitoring by integrating its long range ultrasonic testing (LRUT) with sophisticated sensors and systems in order to detect defects in the annular ring and bottom plates. The principal aim of this action is to provide final pre-launch confirmation of performance data to demonstrate the capability of SafeAST in detecting time-dependent degradation of the AST tank floor. The secondary aim is to provide a package of comprehensive launch material (including validated Technical Reports, supportive marketing material, final hardware specification and software sign-off) to aid a successful launch. The five-strong SafeAST consortium comprises the Tüpras oil and gas company which operates tank farms, research and academic organisations, plus client-facing industrial product development consultancies. Its Vision is to create a highly profitable, sustainable company (cash positive in 2 years, turnover €24m in four years) capable of delivering both hardware and services worth €80k pa to the AST condition monitoring sector (t/o €800m in Europe alone) and for its core technology to be recognised as the global primary on-line monitoring method in the world’s 7600 live plants.

The European ship fleet counts 23,000 vessels, accounting for the 40% of the global gross tonnage. Marine industry is a major prosperity engine of the EU contributing a total of €147bn to the GDP and supporting more than 1.7m jobs. However, the vessels’ structural integrity verification is a major issue for the shipping industry. Regulations dictate that Non Destructive Testing (NDT) inspections should be performed every 5 years for the first decade of a vessel’s life and every 2.5 years thereafter. Ship hull weld inspection is a challenging process as safety-critical welds length exceeds 120km in large vessels and involves human inspectors on site using scaffolding or cherry-pickers. These procedures require long periods of dry-docking incurring loss of revenue and costs amounting to more than €150k per inspection. Moreover conventional ultrasonic techniques cannot be applied on metal plates of thickness <10mm, which are commonly used nowadays to reduce ship weight. This necessitates the use of dangerous radiographic techniques posing health and safety issues. These challenges give rise to a unique business opportunity which Spectrum Labs and Tecnitest (leading NDT equipment and service providers) along with Innora (dynamic high-tech company specializing in robotics) and TWI (global leader in NDT technology) aspire to seize with the help of Lloyds’ Register, the most reputable shipping service provider with 230 years of experience. We aim to redefine ship NDT inspection by commercializing ShipTest, a laser-guided robotic crawler able to automatically track the weld and inspect the hull while the ship is at sea. Through a combination of bleeding-edge ultrasonic and electromagnetic techniques ShipTest can accurately inspect metal plates of <10mm thickness eliminating the need for radiography. By commercialising ShipTest we will grow our businesses by €47.7m, cumulatively over 5 years, generating €19.04m in profits and creating 398 direct jobs and 1185 indirect jobs

To achieve a thorough investigation for defect presence on a wind turbine blade, close inspection is required. This implies either trained staff tied with ropes on the blade or dismantling and transferring the blade in a workshop environment. While blade dismantling is scarcely used because it requires very long downtime, human inspection also involve a relatively high delay. A solution to this problem is to utilize specially designed platforms that can reach the blade and implement faster inspections on site. However, current systems are not very agile or cannot reach close enough to the blade in order to use a high quality nondestructive technique. Hence, they are mostly used to carry out mere visual inspections. To deal with the aforementioned challenge, our team will commercialize WInspector. WInspector consists of an agile robotic platform able to climb up the wind turbine tower and deploy an advanced Digital Shearography kit that carries out the inspection of a blade at a depth of up to 50mm. Users of WInspector benefit through early detecting emerging defects unseen in a visual inspection performed by competing solutions, with a significantly lower downtime for the WTB, and free of dangerous human labor. We have tested and validated the capabilities of WInspector in relevant environment and based on feedback received by wind farm operators, including project participant Gamesa and Iberdola (who has supported us in writing for this application), we are now ready to take the next steps and complete product development allowing us to bring WInspector into the market. Our vision is to grow our businesses by €19.88 million in gross sales by 2023 and keep growing at 58.8% annually from 2023 onwards. Through our business growth, we will create 181 new jobs. It is our strong belief that the Fast Track to Innovation Pilot is the ideal financial instrument for us to accelerate the procedures required for commercialization.