The first project activities were focused on the recruitment of highly-skilled ESRs, their training, and the development of formulations that can extend the applicability of the targeted computational tools to industrially-relevant configurations. Efforts were initially devoted to the successful completion of the ESR recruitment. A cohort of 3 ESRs was recruited and enrolled in the doctoral program of the recruiting beneficiary within a 5-month window. In accordance with the DoA, all ESRs were assigned a supervisor and a co-supervisor, and submitted yearly progress reports. Another activity has been network coordination. The Supervisory Board was set-up and includes 5 representatives from each beneficiary. The SB has met via teleconference mode during the ESR selection process, during the kick-off meeting, and during the mid-term meeting. On the occasion of the kick-off meeting, the Career Development Plan (CDP) for each recruited ESR was discussed and finalized. In the first year, the EPQ was also completed, the website was prepared, launched and regularly updated since then.
Subsequently, the research and training activities pertaining to WPs 1-4 have started. These activities were slowed down by the Covid-19 pandemic, which imposed severe restrictions to in-person activities and to ESR mobility for many months. This led to some activities lagging behind. In particular, the research activities requiring experimental measurements and mobility of one ESR to carry out the industrial secondment had to be delayed. Because of these delays, the end of the project was extended by 6 months.
Training activities have started upon ESR recruitment. Overall, four training schools, with an attached internal workshop, were offered: three organized by the academic beneficiaries, which contributed directly to the lectures together with carefully-selected external lecturers, and one organized by a non-academic partner (Esteco) on topics related to multidisciplinary software optimization.
The main project results can be summarized as follows:
1. recruitment of ESRs
2. advanced, highly-specialized training of the ESRs
3. development of new computational tool formulations
4. development of open data and software repositories
5. cross-fertilization between academia and industry
6. dissemination of project activities and achieved results
Among the exploitable results, an important achievement has been the definition of a CDP for each ESR: This plan guides their training-through-research and training-on-the-job, but also their career perspectives after the Phd. Another exploitable result is the definition of the Data Management plan, which served as basis for the development of the public repositories that have been made freely available to interested users. Such open repositories, which include not only post-processed datasets but also source codes and post-processing software, are uncommon and provide industrial practitioners with an unprecedented amount of data for validating commercial codes or reduced-order models. The website, complemented by scientific publications, is an additional means for effectively disseminating the project’s results, making them accessible beyond the project's period of action.
