Project description
Fostering clean, quiet and sustainable mobility in Europe
Noise pollution is recognised as the second-largest environmental health threat in Europe. Consequently, the EU’s Zero Pollution Action Plan for 2030 includes goals to reduce both vehicle emissions and noise. From an engineering standpoint, this means building vehicles from a new class of materials that are lightweight to reduce emissions, mechanically strong and acoustically insulated. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MetaLight project aims to create such multifunctional metamaterials for cleaner, quieter and more sustainable mobility. The project combines expertise in computational mechanics, topology optimisation, predictive acoustics and metamaterial design to develop an AI-powered, physics-informed inverse-design framework that enables algorithms to automatically determine material architectures based on target properties.
Objective
The EU is a world leader in the transport industry, facing the dual challenge of the Green Deal's decarbonization targets and a public health crisis from traffic noise, which contributes to 66,000 premature deaths annually. Advanced lightweight materials like aluminum alloys are critical for reducing emissions, but their high stiffness and low damping make them poor acoustic insulators. This creates a fundamental industrial deadlock: vehicles are either lightweight and noisy or quiet and heavy. A new class of materials that is simultaneously lightweight, strong, and quiet is therefore essential for the future of sustainable European transport.
Acoustic metamaterials show promise, but their design is hampered by a critical challenge. Current design paradigms, which rely on intuition and slow, iterative simulations, have only produced structures that are either mechanically robust or acoustically effective, but never both. Investigating the vast and complex design space to discover novel material topologies that resolve this contradictory performance trade-off is a fundamental problem that remains unresolved.
MetaLight will bring together a Fellow with expertise in computational mechanics and topology optimization, the host institution's leading academic know-how in predictive acoustics, and the associated partner’s world-leading expertise in metamaterial design. The project’s goal is to develop the next generation of multifunctional metamaterials for the European transport sector.
MetaLight will resolve this industrial deadlock by establishing an AI-driven, physics-informed inverse-design framework. This will enable the automated discovery of novel structures that are simultaneously lightweight, strong, and quiet, boosting Europe to the forefront of the advanced materials and sustainable transport markets.
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.
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.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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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.
Funding Scheme
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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.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
3000 Leuven
Belgium
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.