Innovative Advanced Materials (IAMs) for robust, fast curing sealants and coatings for manufacturing and final assembly (IA) (Innovative Advanced Materials for Europe partnership)

Expected Outcome

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Support the implementation of the Commission Communication on Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership[1].
• Prolong lifespan and performance of components and products across sectors using IAMs-based coatings, functionalised surfaces and/or sealings to withstand specific or challenging requirements and/or harsh environments;
• Lower maintenance needs and overall reduced Cost of Ownership for essential, structural or functional components and products;
• Lower environmental impact through improved resource efficiency, reduced energy consumption, increased recyclability at end of life and/or substitution of hazardous substances.
• Proof of concept of the ‘safe and sustainable by design’ (SSbD) framework during the development phase of the new IAMs;
• Promote industrial uptake of IAMs by facilitating scalability and/or integration into leaner industrial production processes;

Scope

One of the main factors limiting the lifespan of products (and their components) is their prolonged exposure to environmental elements. The combination of different stressors and changing conditions (operational, daily, seasonal) results in accelerated aging and premature or unanticipated failures. To prevent the resulting adverse effects, protective coatings and sealings are key to provide additional protection without requiring the reassessment of the physical design of the product/component, nor the inherent properties of the parts to be coated/sealed.

Moreover, performance evaluation of coated samples to select coating solutions which meet the demands of industrial end users constitute another bottleneck in the fast development of IAM-based coatings. In addition, recyclability is often hampered by the sealants and coatings used. The new IAMs-based coatings, functionalised surfaces and sealings should allow to decompose products and structures into recyclable or reusable parts.

Proposals should develop new and/or improved IAMs-based coatings, functionalised surfaces and/or sealings that improve recyclability, circularity and safety of developed materials and products, reduce (raw) materials consumption, costs of production, manufacturing and disassembly by:

• Combining multiple functionalities, e.g. fast curing and drying, self-curing, mechanical and durable robustness, protection from environmental agents (sun, rain, snow, humidity, corrosion, erosion, temperature, …), or a combination of beneficial thermal, acoustic, magnetic, electrical and tribological properties;
• Satisfy multiple requirements across different application areas such as electronics; (renewable) energy production and storage; automotive; maritime; aviation and rail infrastructures; construction, including HVAC[2] components;

Multidisciplinary research activities should address at least two of the following:

• Develop strategies to accelerate the time-consuming performance evaluation step to greatly reduce the times to prototyping and then to market.
• Develop functionalised surfaces (directly functionalised or via coatings), which can substantially improve the integrity, efficiency and overall performance of products and can cope with sometimes extreme surface areas (small/large) and complex and/or high aspect ratio geometries requiring advanced processing and tooling;
• Design and develop new sealants and coatings that can be applied by automated processes (higher speed and precision by digitalization), cured at room temperature (no extra heating or air conditioning of large paint shops or hangars required) and with curing times reduced by at least 90% compared to the state-of-the-art (in terms of increased productivity and/or decreased energy consumption);
• Master batch synthesis of IAMs with cutting-edge properties that allow production and processing of robust, fast and/or self-curing sealants and coatings to be applied in the manufacturing and final assembly lines in industries, and transferable between sectors;
• Produce and share new knowledge on underlying multi-scale and multi-physics phenomena to better understand materials behaviour during their lifetime, develop and validate methodologies and suitable models to predict material degradation and assess release rates from coatings and sealants used in harsh environments;

In addition, all proposals should

• Use new digital technologies including data driven approaches to push the frontiers of designing and producing IAMs with new functionalities/performance, improve materials scalability and related processes and use analytical technologies and infrastructures to characterise the efficiency, quality and effectiveness of developed sealants, coatings or surfaces;
• Contribute to the availability of FAIR[3] data and methods for safety and sustainability assessment of IAMs and for decision-making processes (at the design, engineering and end-of-life stage of IAMs and products);
• Explore possibilities to transfer and use developed IAMs or technologies in other sectors;
• Assess safety, sustainability and circularity of all components during the entire innovation cycle as well as how to decompose and sort for enhanced recyclability of all components at the end of life, in line with the safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) framework.

Proposals need to address both the IAM development and all the supporting technologies (digital and physical) needed (not existing yet) to cover the entire value chain (material development, validation, production, processing, use and end of life). Any existing technologies that do not require development or adaptation should be mentioned in the proposal.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination.

Research should build on existing standards or contribute to standardisation of technologies for IAM-based sealings and coatings. Interoperability for data sharing should be addressed, in accordance with the FAIR[3] data principles. Projects should build on, or seek collaboration with, existing projects in EU Member States and Associated Countries and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms. Where relevant, projects are encouraged to take advantage of and connecting to European research infrastructures and services in the area of analytical research infrastructures.

International cooperation is encouraged, especially with Japan.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership Innovative Advanced Materials for EU (IAM4EU). Proposals funded under this topic are part of the partnership portfolio and are expected to develop synergies with the related stakeholder community and contribute actively to the objectives of the partnership. The different stakeholder communities in IAM4EU are encouraged to coordinate amongst and across each other and foresee adequate resources for this as well as for the overall coordination with IAM4EU in the proposals.

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Activities are expected to start at TRL 3-4 and achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

[1] COM(2024) 98 final

[2] Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning

[3] Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable data

[4] Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable data