Project description
Innovative coatings for energy-intensive industries
The equipment used in energy-intensive industries is pushed to the limit, but improvement of current and future equipment is essential to increase production efficiency, component lifetime and reduce environmental impact. Innovation of the materials is the key. The EU-funded FORGE project will develop novel coatings of compositionally complex alloys and ceramics, combining machine learning models, thermodynamic calculations, and high-throughput experiments. FORGE will demonstrate these coatings on processes such as CO2-capture, waste heat recovery, components undergoing wear and in kilns, defying the acting degradation forces, and assuring coating effectiveness with smart monitoring of their deterioration. FORGE aims to minimise the overall capital and operative expenses especially in steelmaking, aluminium, tiles and cement industries.
Objective
"The FORGE project has been specified as necessary by our energy-intensive industrial members, who, in order to intensify and update their future processes, need to improve equipment capability to withstand corrosion, erosion and brittle failures from gas collection and kiln operations, to maintain the equipment’s up-time and production efficiency. Current materials used in these exceptionally harsh environments, (and the corresponding design models) are not capable of robustly resisting degradation, leading to the constant need to inspect and repair damage. The FORGE project will train a machine-learning model to guide high-throughput experiments, to develop novel high performance coatings of targeted “Compositionally Complex Alloys"" and Ceramic counterparts, to be applied to the key specified vulnerable process stages (eg CO2 capture and waste heat recovery pipework, heat exchangers, kiln refractories) in response to the specific degradation forces we find at each point. We will also capture the underlying principles of the material resistance, to proactively design the equipment for performance while minimising overall capex costs from these new alloys. The FORGE consortium has industrial user members from steel, cement, aluminium and ceramic industries and specialist materials, to ensure the project's focus on real-world issues, coupled with world-leading experience in the development of materials, protective coatings and their application to harsh environments. In addition to developing the new coating materials and techniques, we also aim to provide a new overarching set of design paradigms and generate an underpinning Knowledge Based System to inform this and future work in other energy intensive industries."
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
31030 Carbonera
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.