Rare Earth and magnets innovation hubs (IA)

The action should create an innovation hub that enables the development, demonstration and testing of new processes for production of rare earths and related products, particularly neodymium permanent magnets in the industrial environments. This hub should connect critical mass of the existing laboratories, industrial pilots and other research facilities and services across different regions in the Europe and if duly justified also in third countries.

The hub should demonstrate its functionality on a range of concrete developments up to the TRL levels 6-7 to be executed within the duration of the action. Demonstrations could cover novel, cost-effective and environmentally sound rare earths extraction, processing and separation routes; consider unconventional rare earth sources, like low grade ores, non-ferrous metals beneficiation tailings and iron ore tailings, metallurgical waste apatite; and/or recycling, re-use, refurbishment and/or repurposing of end-of-life products and components containing rare earth magnets. The hub could additionally address development of breakthrough separation, fragmentation and magnetization approaches, finishing at TRL levels 4-5.

Actions should envisage clustering activities with other relevant selected projects for cross-projects co-operation, consultations and joint activities on cross-cutting issues and share of results as well as participating in joint meetings and communication events. To this end proposals should foresee a dedicated work package and/or task, and earmark the appropriate resources accordingly.

Actions should facilitate the market uptake of solutions developed through industrially- and user-driven multidisciplinary consortia covering the relevant value chain and should consider standardisation aspects when relevant. The action should also include the analysis of financial opportunities ensuring the market exploitation and replication of the circular business model behind the developed solutions as new processes, products and/or services.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination. For TRLs 6-7, a credible strategy to achieve future full-scale deployment in the EU is expected, indicating the commitments of the industrial partners after the end of the project.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and/or gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement, however, should you consider it to be of relevance for your specific proposal, you are strongly encouraged to do it.