Objective
The European engineering sector is an essential pillar of the EU worth €300Bn with 375,000 companies, 90% of which are SMEs providing jobs for 20 million. 253,000 of these companies are SMEs involved in metal machining. The sector is under intense pressure from cheap imports from the Far-East where labour costs are much less. Further pressures have arisen from ever-tightening but essential environmental legislation in the EU resulting in increased disposal costs and tightening of pollution discharges. Consequently the number of engineering workshops has reduced by 20% in the last 5 years.
This key SME sector must respond if it is to survive.
These engineering companies use water-mix metalworking fluids (MWFs) in their machining processes for lubrication and cooling. It is these MWFs that present a significant environmental problem since they have finite lifetimes, typically 1 year and current waste treatment technologies are ineffective due to the complex make-up of spent MWFs resulting in toxic fluid being discharged to sewer. As IAGs, we represent the needs of our large SME membership base of 6,400 companies. We aim to develop a Total MWF Disposal Technology consisting of enhanced separation membranes and a new ceramic photocatalytic oxidation process to reduce the 4 billion litres of spent MWF by 50% through new recycling opportunities. Assuming a modest penetration market penetration of 2% this will equate to savings in the region of €32M in MWF disposal costs p.a. across the EU. To provide the critical mass required to develop and make a significant positive impact upon our sector we need the RTD providers to develop the science knowledge and technical capability and core SMEs to ultimately manufacture the FILTER product. As IAGs, we have the means to disseminate, train and promote the technology to the engineering sector. For this reason, the Collective Instrument is the best mechanism to deliver a solution to the large SME community we represent.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringtribologylubrication
- natural scienceschemical scienceselectrochemistryelectrolysis
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringmanufacturing engineeringsubtractive manufacturing
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwaste managementwaste treatment processes
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Call for proposal
FP6-2004-SME-COLL
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
Collective - SMEs-Collective research projectsCoordinator
LONDON
United Kingdom