Environmental concerns motivate a transition to liquid hydrogen aviation fuel in coming decades, and for this technology the size, placement and connections of the hydrogen tank on an aircraft are key decisions. The Hydrogen Aircraft Sloshing Tank Advancement project (HASTA) aims to experimentally and computationally investigate the storage of liquid hydrogen (LH2) for airborne use as fuel in civil aircraft applications. Size and position of a LH2 tank inside an aircraft are limiting factors for range, payload and aircraft size, and consequently play a crucial role in the environmental impact. The goal of facilitating tank design will be achieved through creation of design criteria for LH2 aircraft tanks; these design guidelines will be based on the different tools and models of derived during the project, in particular those aimed at complex cryogenic sloshing. The experimentally validated design tools developed during HASTA are to be used for both conceptual and detailed design in the aircraft industry, and therefore span a range of fidelities from reduced order models to full computational methods. The primary focus of this project will be the development of LH2 capabilities, and particularly the extension of mature capabilities already available for sloshing of standard civil aircraft fuel (kerosene) to the cryogenic temperatures associated with LH2. These capabilities are well reflected in the composition of the consortium, which includes partners with both experimental and modelling experience of fuel slosh, as well as cryogenics for space applications. The ultimate goal of the project is development of experimentally validated numerical and analytical simulation tools to model the complex thermo-fluid-dynamics of cryogenic LH2 coupled to the thermo–mechanical behavior of a tank and its operational environment.

A growing trend in the field are NFTs or non-fungible tokens. “Non-fungible” is a relevant feature in the creative industries as it is unique and can’t be replaced by anything else. Transactions using NFTs over blockchains allow audiences to easily acquire unique content from the artists, users and creators take part in a cultural and artistic distributed community or gamify the experience with creative content. DAFNE+ will use this technologies to focus on the definition of novel revenue and business models to the cultural and creative industries, improving their global reach and open up new distributions channels without the imposed rules by intermediaries - even controlling the artists revenues- which is many cases are not based on EU (e.g YouTube). Therefore, DAFNE+ aims to create new distributed autonomous organizations / communities (DAO) around digital tokens and NFT, with a decentralized governance where cultural and creative industries (CCI), as be a driver of innovation and competitiveness, can play a role in the community governance and deciding on the rules of the community. DAFNE+ will provide novel services and tools for intuitive and simple content creation by developing new applications (in case of absence or closed approach) that will enable users to produce and ingest new content which can be directly valued and distributed. DAFNE+ will also aim at increasing the legal transparency around the creation, online distribution, and sharing of existing and novel forms of artistic content via blockchain technologies and involving smart contracts NFTs and other digital tokens. Towards this objective, DAFNE+ will map and analyse the relevant IP legal framework in the EU, and in particular the copyright regulatory framework, in order to identify and assess specific legal requirements, opportunities as well as barriers stemming from the identified IP framework which may impact the use of blockchain technologies in online content creation and sharing.

NextSim partners, as fundamental European players in Aeronautics and Simulation, recognise that there is a need to increase the capabilities of current Computational Fluid Dynamics tools for aeronautical design by re-engineering them for extreme-scale parallel computing platforms. The backbone of NextSim is centred on the fact that, today, the capabilities of leading-edge emerging HPC architectures are not fully exploited by industrial simulation tools. Current state-of-the-art industrial solvers do not take sufficient advantage of the immense capabilities of new hardware architectures, such as streaming processors or many-core platforms. A combined research effort focusing on algorithms and HPC is the only way to make possible to develop and advance simulation tools to meet the needs of the European aeronautical industry. NextSim will focus on the development of the numerical flow solver CODA (Finite Volume and high-order discontinuous Galerkin schemes), that will be the new reference solver for aerodynamic applications inside AIRBUS group, having a significant impact in the aeronautical market. To demonstrate NextSim market impact, AIRBUS has defined a series of market relevant problems. The numerical simulation of those problems is still a challenge for the aeronautical industry and their solution, at a required accuracy and an affordable computational costs, is still not possible with the current industrial solvers. Following this idea, three additional working areas are proposed in NextSim: algorithms for numerical efficiency, algorithms for data management and the efficiency implementation of those algorithms in the most advanced HPC platforms. Finally, NextSim will provide access to project results trough the “mini-apps” concept, small pieces of software, seeking synergies with open-source components, which demonstrate the use of the novel mathematical methods and algorithms developed in CODA but that will be freely distributed to the scientific community.