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Maintaining industrial leadership in aeronautics

 

Proposed actions should address one or several of the following priority areas:

―Condition-based health management, replacing scheduled inspections and thus decreasing maintenance costs and increasing safety and aircraft availability through accelerating the integration of innovative and existing sensor technologies, advancing data analysis methods and promoting standards for health sensing across dissimilar systems and structures, developing and validating multiple sensor technologies on systems and structures, and addressing relevant regulatory barriers.

―Advancements in composite aero-structures that have the potential to offer alternative competitive technologies and methodologies and are presently at low Technology Readiness Levels (e.g. new generation materials and composite structures, validation of new simulation and design methodologies, advanced manufacturing methods, including out-of-autoclave, joining between composites similar or dissimilar media fatigue and damage tolerance behaviour and the related structural health monitoring and repair methodologies, long term behaviour and degradation of eco-efficient surface protection).

―Internal and external Electromagnetic Environment technologies addressing at large electromagnetic immunity problems stemming from the increasing complexity of on-board systems in a composite aero-structures and smart materials environment. Analysis of regulatory and standardisation issues should be provided and certification/qualification issues addressed.

―Development and validation of multi-disciplinary design tools that address key isolated or clustered industrial problems with low degree of confidence that need presently extensive experimental verification. Activities may contribute to advancing further physical understanding of multi-physics phenomena, simulation of manufacturing processes and design of experiments, uncertainty quantification, cross-cutting computational procedures as well as preparatory work for transition to high-performance computing.

Given the strong involvement of SMEs in the supply chain, this topic is particularly relevant for SME participation.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 5 and 9 million each would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

European aeronautics has never been stronger, however new opportunities and challenges lie towards 2020 and beyond. Research and innovation is the main response towards maintaining the competitiveness throughout the whole supply chain. While a number of technologies are already addressed under the Clean Sky 2 Public-Private Partnership, there are other promising ones at low maturity levels that need to be further advanced. Primes, suppliers including SMEs, research laboratories and academia should collaborate in an efficient and timely manner to bring these innovative technologies to higher maturity levels for these advanced and cost-efficient products and services.

The actions will contribute towards maintaining the leadership of the European aeronautics industry through increased availability of new innovative design tools, materials, manufacturing and service processes:

―For the condition-based health management, the actions will quantitatively demonstrate potential improvements towards weight benefits, systems complexity and reduced maintenance costs and demonstrate that European primes and suppliers have an agreed common roadmap towards potential exploitation of the results.

―For the novel composite aero-structures, the actions will demonstrate their capability to drive costs down and production rates up using new generation composites as well as nonconventional manufacturing methods.

―For the internal and external electromagnetic environment technologies, the actions will demonstrate that an increase up to 60% of the confidence in the electromagnetic assessment process is feasible. The proposals will also demonstrate that the proposed concepts and development of tools will contribute to substantial reduction of cost (including qualification and certification) and time-to-market.

―For the development and validation of multi-disciplinary design tools, the actions will develop computing solutions for key industrial problems to facilitate the introduction of innovative products and services.