Thanks to emerging materials and digital technologies, the product design space is larger than ever. Despite this, EU manufacturers are struggling to innovate, with traditional tools presenting a major bottleneck. Existing machining tools were designed for a more stable world, when a single process flow would remain unchanged for years. To increase competitiveness and respond to new opportunities, the manufacturing industry now needs customisable tools, applicable to multiple processes, and rapidly reconfigurable in response to changing needs. FLASH is an industry driven project, led by global manufacturing leader PRIMA and supported by 6 large enterprises, 6 innovative SMEs, 2 Universities, 2 RTOs, and a manufacturing association, EWF, that represents >55k companies globally. FLASH will leverage the benefits of laser-based manufacturing, which is more flexible, more amenable to digital control, and generates less waste than traditional mechanical/chemical/thermal processes. Whilst state of the art laser-based machines are optimised for a single application, FLASH will develop a flexible platform with three built-in laser sources, allowing multi-wavelength emission, over a broad pulse length regime with dynamic beam shaping, in a flexible robotic/CNC cell with three different beam delivery heads. The result will be a futureproof system capable of at least 10 macro and micro production processes over all major material types, designed to enable flexible and customisable manufacturing of rapidly evolving products for a range of industries. The benefits of FLASH will be industrially demonstrated in the automotive (car cross beam), medical (hip implant), e-mobility (electric motor hairpins) and tooling (micro drills, super abrasive grinding wheels) industries, where significant process-time, -cost and -energy savings are expected, alongside unlocking product benefits through design modifications and material substitutions not possible using existing technologies.

BUTTERFLIES aims to drive Europe towards sustainability and technological progress through Biointelligent Manufacturing, using biological systems to create innovative production technologies. Our project will achieve these aims by addressing challenges currently preventing widespread uptake of bio-polymers in advanced additive manufacturing (AM). The BUTTERFLIES bio-inspired advancements are based on chitin, one of the most abundant bio-polymers on Earth (second only to cellulose), and applied specifically to binder jetting (BJT) and 2 photon polymerisation (2PP) AM processes. Environmental sustainability will be achieved through chitin nanocrystal crosslinkers that bind chitin biopolymers in BJT and photocurable chitosan bio-polymer in 2PP. These approaches will offer streamlined production to replace petroleum-based plastics and non-environmentally friendly binders. BUTTERFLIES seeks to transform and revolutionise European manufacturing and products through seamless integration of biomaterials into additive manufacturing processes. BUTTERFLIES will address the challenges associated with the processing of biomaterials such as chitin and chitosan in processes such as binder jetting (BJT) and 2 photon polymerisation (2PP). Environmental sustainability will be achieved through low-temperature bio-based binders that will offer streamlined production to replace petroleum-based plastics and binders with chitin, the second most common biopolymer in nature. BUTTERFLIES will focus on development of smart bioproduct and hybrid manufacturing techniques through key technology developments: - BJT and 2PP for bio-intelligent 3D manufacturing to manufacture complex structures from biomaterials with embedded intelligence from bioprocesses and mimicry of real biological systems. -Novel biomaterial binders -Process design for BJ and 2PP-based 3D printing of biomaterials. -Process scalability of the 2PP technique based on laser beam shaping and multi-beam processing.

START project primary objective is to build an innovation ecosystem in the European Union (EU) based on the development of sustainable and economically viable thermoelectric (TE) waste heat harvesting systems to be applied in heavy industry and in maritime industry as well as primary power source for off-grid sensors and IoT devices. This objective will be achieved by incorporating abundant sulphides (mainly tetrahedrite mineral series), at present an environment hazard in mine tailings, collected in five European countries, in the production of advanced sulphide p-type TE thermoelements. In contrast, current commercial TE devices incorporate p-type and n-type TE thermoelements that are produced from expensive and rare elements, namely tellurium, which is predominantly sourced in China. The impact of START project approach on endorsing a more sustainable and resilient EU comes from three inputs. First, by reducing EU?s dependence on primary critical raw materials. Secondly, through the promotion of circular economy processes that will create value in EU by building a strategic ecosystem based on a high-abundant mineral. Just recently, it was demonstrated by our team that the mineral was amenable to processing to single phase p-type tetrahedrite. Thirdly, by the production of TE energy harvesting systems offering a contribution to the reduction of fossil fuels consumption with a great impact on the increase of the overall efficiency of energy production and consumption systems, as well as on the reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions. For that, START project aggregates research organizations, with strong background and knowledge on geology, materials science and renewable energies, and industrial organizations that guarantee the entire production and exploitation supply chain.

SYNTECS brings together a consortium of industry leaders and academic and research organisations that are at the forefront of laser-based processing. SYNTECS is designed to tackle the multiple challenges experienced with current chemical and mechanical surface treatments. The overall aim of SYNTECS is to develop and demonstrate a digital and green laser texturing approach to generating complex multifunctional surfaces. A machine platform will be developed (TRL6), that enables interchangeable Direct Laser Writing (DLW), Direct Laser Interference Patterning (DLIP) and Laser Induced Periodic Surface Structuring (LIPSS), with a multi-axis motion stage for processing complex geometries and an inline monitoring and control system. The combined system will streamline the generation of hierarchical surface textures, i.e. textures which combine at least two significantly different sized features. The surface multi-functionality enabled by these hierarchical textures will be demonstrated in three industrial case studies: an injection moulding tool, a hip implant system and a complex shaped vapour chamber. Surface textures and texturing processes for these demonstrators will be designed using a Design for Surface Engineering software module, which will incorporate LCA guidance combined with predictive performance modelling to enable sustainable-by-design decision making. SYNTECS will demonstrate that hierarchical laser surface texturing provides a highly efficient and flexible route to replacing multiple (typically chemical and mechanical) energy and resources intensive surface treatments steps with a single, digitally controlled, chemical- and waste-free process.