PRELUDE will facilitate the transition to clean energy by combining innovative, smart, low-cost solutions into a proactive optimization service. The project is focused on assessing the right level of smartness necessary for any given household and then providing the optimal tools according to the needs of the user (occupant or tenant, owner or manager and energy service provider). It is designed to be versatile and adapt to the engagement level and monitoring and automation level of the building, motivating them to invest by increasing engagement and the smartness of the household. Passive solutions, such as natural ventilation and cooling will be prioritized through a free running strategy to reduce the energy consumption of mechanical HVAC. Predictive maintenance will be implemented to reduce maintenance and repair costs, emphasizing RES. Big data and advanced analytic tools will be used to facilitate flexible building-side demand and ease the integration into district heating and electricity grids. Proactive optimization will be achieved through data predictive control. These components will be interfaced through cloud middleware to deliver a highly interchangeable and interoperable solution. PRELUDE is designed as an optimization service, providing clear and pertinent feedback and suggesting retrofitting actions on a cost-efficient basis through dynamic building renovation passports. The project’s innovations will be demonstrated in a wide spectrum of applications: individual multi-apartment buildings in Turin and Geneva, large scale residential in Krakow, social housing in Athens, detached modern nZEBs in Denmark and on a district scale in the Municipality of Aalborg. Each of these cases featuring unique challenges and benefits for the users. PRELUDE will achieve energy savings exceeding 35% by leveraging both occupant and building operations. Similarly, maintenance and repair costs will be reduced by over 39%.

In a regulatory context favorable to non-synthetic refrigerant fluids, the aim of the project is to achieve proof of concept for a heat pump (HP) using natural, non-flammable and non-toxic fluids: water and CO2. The novel combination of these two abundant and inert fluids makes it possible to exploit the thermodynamic advantages of each while cancelling out their disadvantages. The use of water and CO2 stands out from the use of hydrocarbon and fluorinated refrigerants, which are respectively highly flammable and harmful to the environment. Laboratory tests in a simulated environment (climatic chamber and hot water network) will be used to validate the concept and create a data-driven model. This model will be used to carry out an energetic and environmental assessment of the solution for real-life use cases, simulated by building thermal models and a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The LCA can then highlight and help to improve this solution's comparative advantage over others in terms of environmental impact. The approach therefore involves several scales of analysis (from component to system) in order to correctly quantify the HP's performance, and is also cross-cutting as it focuses on technological innovation and environmental impacts, which we consider essential to guarantee the objectives of the European industry's ecological transition. The project will create the technical basis for a safe and efficient HP segment that will be robust against regulatory uncertainties.

IN2AQUAS will train 15 doctoral candidates (DCs) for facing the complex challenge of envisaging the pollutant impact on the environment and of tailoring the proper treatments for the production of safe and clean water -also in extreme environments- using green approaches through high quality research, training, management and innovation. This goal will be attained via a structured training-through-research programme, consisting of original individual research projects and education on technical and transferable skills. Experts from 10-degree awarding universities, 4 national research centers, 1 associated university, 4 companies and a highly qualified mindfulness-in-the-workplace facilitator will join forces to facilitate the successful training programme that will allow DCs to be awarded with a double doctoral degree in two different countries. These aims will be pursued by applying different actions, which include the study and development of innovative technologies against the water pollution, paying attention not only to the sustainability of the water management systems (in a circular economy vision), but also to the reuse of water, the recovery of nutrients and the green synthesis of functional materials. The developed technologies will be tailored to variegated scenarios with particular emphasis to three case studies: aquaculture, arid areas and (remote) cold areas. The overall research goals will imply three main steps: 1) the assessment of water quality and the prediction of its response toward the increased environmental stresses; 2) restore water quality while approaching the zero waste discharge and 3) scale up and process integration. The multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and intersectoral network will forge creative entrepreneurial and innovative scientists, who will be equipped with the skills, tools, insights and flexibility that enable them to be the next generation of Urban Water System management innovators.

The overall objective of the project is to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders leveraging on EOSC and the other existing operational dataspaces. Besides supporting the ongoing development of the EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA is addressing the specific need for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across those two domains. A specific goal of AquaINFRA will be to develop an EOSC based research infrastructure combining the marine and freshwater domains, which will include the development of a cross domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. A set of strategic use cases including a Pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea will provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities. The AquaINFRA project results are expected to contribute to the utilisation of EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure enabling collaboration across the domains of marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders working on restoring of healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.