Durable biofilm-restraining surfaces and cleaning procedures for the food processing industry

Objective

Efficient and safe food production is a prerequisite for building a society capable of feeding the growing population. With the world population growing at extraordinary rates and the consequent repercussions in the dietary and consumption habits, it is estimated that food production has to be increased at least by 70% in the next 30 years, with the looming threat of a proportional surge of food-borne diseases, which will occur predictably.

This is particularly true for the most striking cause of these outbreaks, to which the food industry did not seem to have found effective counter-measures so far: biofouling, which is the contamination of surfaces with hygienically relevant microorganisms and their eventual development and implementation into biofilms .

There is currently not a thorough, effective and integrated solution to eliminate biofouling completely. This has a negative impact both on the economic performances of the enterprises and on their image, affecting product quality and quantity, forcing preventive overdosing of biocides and cleaners, and causing production downtime for cleaning and disinfection cycles.

The food industry needs to improve anti-fouling strategies and to effective implement them into the production process.

The CLEANSURF project will attack the biofouling through the development of new durable surface coatings to reduce biofilm build-up and facilitate the removal of biofilm and through fine-tuning of the cleaning process to suit the new surfaces.

The CLEANSURF project will develop and test coatings with biofilm restraining properties tailor-made for the food industry in order to:
1)increase effectiveness and productivity by expanding the cleaning intervals and by decreasing the down-time of production equipment enforced by current cleaning procedures;
2)reduce the usage of environmentally harmful chemicals;
3)reduce the energy and water consumption. The coating will be an organic/hybrid silane based coating manufactured by the Sol-Gel approach.

The growing of the food production and consumption represents a huge market opportunity for European companies going into global markets with a competitive edge achieved also through the Cleansurf innovation.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

• social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
• engineering and technology materials engineering coating and films
• natural sciences biological sciences microbiology

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-SME - Specific Programme "Capacities": Research for the benefit of SMEs

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• SME-2013-1 - Research for SMEs

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-SME-2013
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

BSG-SME - Research for SMEs

Coordinator

Participants (6)