Large engineering structures like turbines, bridges or industrial machinery are still manufactured by traditional processes such as forging, casting or by machining from solid blocks. These processes do not allow local control of material properties to achieve a specific function like anti-corrosion or hardness. To meet the functional specifications, engineers must operate within a limited range of design options, with high “buy-to-fly” ratios and long lead times. Unlike any other metal AM technology, wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) produces fully dense metallic structures with no porosity. WAAM is also unbeatable in terms of production times, making it uniquely suited for large and functionally demanding engineering structures. In Grade2XL, we will demonstrate the potential of multi-material wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) for large scale structures. The high printing rate of WAAM, combined with the ability to control material properties down to the nanoscale, will allow us to build strong and durable engineering structures. Grade2XL will deliver multi-material products of superior quality and performance, cut lead times by up to 96% and enable massive cost savings for the maritime and energy industry, as well as for industrial machinery. These outputs will rapidly roll out to other sectors with similar key performance indicators and become an attractive investment opportunity for SMEs. This project will strengthen Europe’s capacity to drive manufacturing innovation globally and withstand growing competition from Asia.

To ensure global competitiveness of small and medium European shipyards, a step change is needed. The key to accomplish this relies on overcoming high production costs and low repeatable quality processes which currently inhibit mass production of Fibre Reinforced Plastic (FRP) ship parts. FIBRE4YARDS will bring a cost-efficient, digitized, automated and modular FRP vessel production approach to increase EU shipbuilders’ competitiveness. FIBRE4YARDS’ objective is to match end-users’ needs with targeted advanced production technologies (adaptive molds, ATP/AFP, 3D printing, curved pultrusion profiles, hot stamping, innovative composite connections) from other competitive industrial sectors, and to transfer, adapt and combine them to improve FRP shipyards’ production and maintenance, in a Shipyard 4.0 environment. Real-scale demonstrators will be designed and manufactured to prove feasibility of technologies. Based on the targeted technologies, design and engineering of small/medium-length FRP vessels will be assessed using advanced computational tools. Compliance with the regulatory framework will be ensured, and the necessary personnel training will be provided. All within validated and viable business models targeting a circular and resource efficient maritime sector. This will lead to an improved cost effectiveness of European shipyards and their supply chain, an increased turn-over and a growth of jobs with new 21st century skillsets. Consortium’s high number of SMEs and a FRP shipyard, facilitate direct exploitation in the targeted supply chain. A robust cost-benefit analysis for stakeholders, business plans for successful commercialization and market uptake will be provided, specifically recommending an adequate IPR protection strategy. Environmental impact diminution is achieved through weight reduction (less fuel consumption), recyclable materials, energy efficient production and addressing noise pollution. The 36 months project requests 5 941 720 € funding.

The external borders of the EU have historically been under great pressure, subject to a variety of threats, which include irregular migration and trafficking of narcotics. Within this context, authorities in charge of border and maritime patrol are faced with different challenges that include the heterogeneity of the traffic that undertakes illegal activities in European waters, limitations in the ability to collect and share timely available data among institutional organizations, as well as a lack of assets by the relevant authorities to cover the wide maritime areas under their mandate. Although there has been an expressive investment done in the domain of surveillance technologies and tools, the intake by the competent authorities has been slow, due to lack of uniformity in the integration of such systems with existing surveillance infrastructures. In order to address these challenges, project COMPASS2020 aims to demonstrate the combined use and seamless coordination of manned and unmanned assets to achieve greater coverage, better quality of information and shorter response times in maritime surveillance operations. The proposed solution will be based on an innovative CONOPS that makes use of multiple aerial and underwater unmanned vehicles with improved capabilities, deployed from OPVs or from land, and will be supported by a central, multi-domain and interoperable Mission System (MS) that enables the operation of these platforms from both locations. UxVs may act as deported ship sensors, providing critical mission data to the MS that can then be exploited through dedicated services to be developed in the scope of the project (e.g. Data Fusion and Threat Risk Analysis). The major goal of COMPASS2020 is to demonstrate an operational solution to ensure long range and persistent surveillance, increasing the situational awareness of coast guards and maritime authorities, and, thus, increasing the cost-effectiveness, availability and reliability of the operations.

EFFECTOR aims to enhance maritime surveillance, improve decisions support, and foster collaboration of maritime stakeholders by implementing an Interoperability Framework and associated Data Fusion and Analytics services for Maritime Surveillance and Border Security that will allow faster detection of new events, better informed decision making, achievement of a joint understanding and undertaking of a situation across borders, allowing seamless cooperation between operating authorities and on-site intervention forces ensuring that all existing privacy and data protection rules are fully respected. Specifically, EFFECTOR will unlock the full capabilities of maritime surveillance systems and data sharing at tactical and strategic level by introducing applied solutions for enhanced border and external security, including the implementation of a multilayered data lake platform for end-to-end interoperability and data exploitation, the exchange of enhanced situational awareness pictures at different level with CISE and EUROSUR, the adoption of interoperability standards for exploiting data sources and systems currently underutilized in maritime environment and the demonstration of new concepts and tools for knowledge extraction, semantic representation, data fusion, analytics, and federated querying that can scale from local to regional and up to national and transnational level. The EFFECTOR solution will be tested, validated and demonstrated in real operational scenarios together with maritime authorities, End Users and practitioners in France, Portugal and Greece. The project will leverage on the developments, results and experience from current and previous research projects (EUCISE2020, MARISA, RANGER, PERSEUS, BLUEMASSMED), from National Procurement projects of CISE Nodes and Adaptors and on the CISE infrastructure of the End Users.