Project description
Open access to a one-stop shop for materials testing will spur European innovation
Materials in motion inevitably encounter other materials. Whether it is a solid moving through a liquid or gas or vice versa, the interacting surfaces and their behaviours are critical to the development of new products. Understanding and predicting what happens with virtually limitless combinations of materials under virtually limitless operating conditions requires extensive testing. European industries of all sizes will soon have access to the world's first open test bed for characterisation of materials and their interacting surfaces when in relative motion (tribology) thanks to the EU-funded i-TRIBOMAT project. The test bed will include test equipment, modelling and analytical tools, experimental design support and online monitoring capabilities. An IT platform will enhance data mining and sharing. Project outcomes could spur an explosion in innovation and rapid realisation of new products, boosting the European economy at this critical time.
Objective
Wherever moving bodies are in contact with each other, the respective materials have to show certain friction and wear (tribological) performance. These materials have to fulfil additional functionality and meet ecological, health and safety regulations too. In order to bring novel materials into products, extensive materials characterisation is required. i-TRIBOMAT aims at establishing the world first open test bed of tribological materials characterisation to support industrial innovations among European manufacturing industries and SMEs by upscaling materials to the mechanical components level. i-TRIBOMAT open test bed enables user-driven versatile characterisation of materials at reduced costs by also shortening the time-to-market ca. 5 times. i-TRIBOMAT will realize a unique bundle of shared tribological infrastructure and expertise consisting of >100 tribometers, materials characterisation equipment and additional tools for modelling, protocols, tribo-analytics, design of experiments and online monitoring. i-TRIBOMAT will establish an IT-platform for materials and tribological data harmonisation, management, analytics, sharing and mining. i-TRIBOMAT on its collaboration interface will supply lab-to-field upscaling tools by combining testing with computation, e.g. using artificial intelligence methods, virtual work rooms and surrogate models for various stakeholders, like EUMAT-platform. i-TRIBOMAT services will be validated by three industrially relevant use cases: energy efficiency (transportation), renewable energy (wind turbine) and manufacturing (seals) represented by large-, medium- and small-sized companies. i-TRIBOMAT will be THE European Single Entry Point offering intelligent Tribological Materials Characterisation to predict the durability of materials in use or novel for a wide field of industrial applications. i-TRIBOMAT is expected to cover ≥6.4 % of the dedicated market with a turnover of 9.6 M€ and EBITA objective of 600 k€/year by 2027.
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Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
2700 Wiener Neustadt
Austria
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.