To reduce climate impact of aviation, decarbonisation is a major challenge. Current combustion chambers are burning hydrocarbon fuels, such as kerosene or more recently emerging SAF products. Hydrogen is also considered today as a promising energy carrier but the burning of hydrogen creates radically new challenges which need to be understood and anticipated. HESTIA specifically focuses on increasing the scientific knowledge of the hydrogen-air combustion of future hydrogen fuelled aero-engines. The related physical phenomena will be evaluated through the execution of fundamental experiments. This experimental work will be closely coupled to numerical activities which will adapt or develop models and progressively increase their maturity so that they can be integrated into industrial CFD codes. Different challenges are to be addressed in HESTIA project in a wide range of topics: - Improvement of the scientific understanding of hydrogen-air turbulent combustion: preferential diffusion of hydrogen, modification of turbulent burning velocity, thermoacoustics, NOx emissions, adaptation of optical diagnostics; - Assessment of innovative injection systems for H2 optimized combustion chamber: flashback risk, lean-blow out, stability, NOx emission minimisation, ignition; - Improvement of CFD tools and methodologies for numerical modelling of H2 combustion in both academic and industrial configurations. To this end, HESTIA gathers 17 universities and research centres as well as the 6 European aero-engine manufacturers to significantly prepare in a coherent and robust manner for the future development of environmentally friendly combustion chambers.

EXCELLERAT P2 continues the fruitful partnership of Europe’s leading HPC centres, application specialists and supporting partners who have worked with and offered their expertise and knowledge to engineering companies and researchers from across industry and academia for the past three decades. A key strength of EXCELLERAT P2 is that it will build on the achievements of EXCELLERAT P1, including the available service portal as a baseline for impact and awareness creation. Furthermore, the critical mass, knowledge and expertise of Europe is re-united and extended by additional experts, to continue the Centre of Excellence, which will span the whole domain of engineering – ensuring that innovations produced are applicable to other engineering challenges, that co-design is handled properly, that success stories are created and distributed, all in all to support best the European HPC strategy. EXCELLERAT P2 will base its evolution and developments on six chosen use cases, requiring the full range of HPC usage profiles, from small scale capacity type applications, all the way to hero run type large scale applications. The advancements the use cases as well as further applications will make beyond the state of the art, as well as the results, which will be derived by the execution of the use cases and the further applications, will have a clear impact in Europe. EXCELLERAT P2 (and the brand) strives to show the contribution of HPC, HPDA and AI in engineering to a low-carbon, more environmentally friendly and socially responsible product development and manufacturing as well as the mobility and energy sector. The holistic view of EXCELLERAT P2 to the usage of HPC (and HPDA and AI) is needed, if engineering applications shall be supported to increase the European competitiveness. Thus, the developments done in EXCELLERAT P2 will increase the European competitiveness in HPC-applications, hardware-design and HPC-service provisioning to a new level.

The Copernicus programme, coordinated and managed by the European Commission, delivers environmental information (largely based on Earth Observation satellite data) in the form of Copernicus Services, addressing six thematic areas: Land, Marine, Atmosphere, Climate Change, Emergency Management and Security. The new Sentinel satellites, recently extended through the successful launch of Sentinel-3, will deliver an unprecedented volume of EO data in high spatial, radiometric and temporal resolution, providing a huge potential for monitoring applications within the Land Monitoring Service - at continental and global scale. The synergistic use of Sentinel-1/2/3 opens up the possibility for new applications, such as the use of time series in the area of Land Monitoring. The ECoLaSS project (Evolution of Copernicus Land Services based on Sentinel data) aims to develop methods and algorithms for pre-operational prototypes improving and developing future specific Copernicus Land services. These prototypes, representing new or improved Copernicus Land Cover and Land Use products, will be demonstrated by means of test/demonstrations sites distributed over Europe and Africa, representing multiple bio-geographic regions and biomes. Prototypes will be designed with high spatial and thematic accuracy, in a timely manner for a pan-European operational Roll-out with the potential for global applications. ECoLaSS will promote the innovation potential of new land monitoring services and applications and might thus contribute to a growing “Copernicus Economy” by boosting (new) Copernicus CORE Land Services and value-added applications (Downstream Services). It is expected, that such new services will bring new opportunities with a wide range of dedicated applications to the market from 2020 onwards and thus significantly contribute to a positive evolution of the Copernicus Land services.