Ongoing

NewSkin | Open testbed for advanced nano-technologies for surfaces

Region:

Europe

Financed by

The NewSkin project aims to create an "Open Innovation Test Bed" (OITB), a new legal entity which will provide the European innovation ecosystem with the necessary technologies, resources and services to uptake a set of game changing, efficient and cost-effective innovative processes to manufacture nano-enabled industrial and consumer products as well as the necessary testing capabilities to demonstrate features of nano-enhanced goods.

Context

The deployment of "Key Enabling Technologies" (KETs) will be the driving force behind a significant part of the goods and services that will be available in the market in the next decade. Amongst KETs, nano-enabled surfaces and membranes must be highlighted due to their huge potential to offer material solutions to address sustainable development goals, resulting in positive and sound impacts for the society and key industrial sectors.

Objective

NewSkin's innovative manufacturing, up-scaling and testing facilities will provide the innovation ecosystem the necessary tools to create and validate to TRL7 and higher(system prototype demonstration in operational environment) new technologies, to meet the challenges of key European industries such as steel, ceramics, transport, water treatment and the general industry.

Approach

During the first two years of project, the NewSkin consortium will work in the creation of the OITB structure, the innovation ecosystem engagement, the upgrade of the testing and pilot plant facilities and the generation of value proposition for the target industries. Once the OITB structure is created and the value proposition validated by the implementation of four show cases by month 24, the OITB will start the services provision according to the defined value proposition. For two years NewSkin services will be available under payment scheme and on free basis in four competitive calls that will be evaluated on a six months basis. After the conclusion of the forth call, the OITB will act as a self-sustainable entity that generates revenues open access services and fair pricing conditions.

NewSkin nano-enabled surfaces and membranes technological portfolio includes:

The complete set of processes for the large-scale manufacturing of graphene nano-enabled membranes (from continuous graphene production to nano-pore creation and functionalization as well as testing facilities).

Continuous laser texturing, roll to roll (R2R) and texturing during moulding (TDM) nano-textures mass production processes

Pilot plant semi-industrial facilities for the definition of efficient automated controlled and nano-safe nano-coating processes for large components.

Continuous PVD and CVD processes.

Moreover, the validation and testing facilities to demonstrate the outstanding performance of the manufactured components in real environments and applications. In addition, the NewSkin consortium will also provide the route to market services during the final commercialization stage, including corporate funding, supply chain management and access to market support.

Sirris is participating in the project through the OWI-Lab and Coatings-Lab. An icing test setup is being developed in Sirris's large climate chamber facility. Size of the icing setup will be approximately 6 m x 3 m x 5 m (length, width, height) and ice will be created in the form of precipitation icing using nozzle-spray array. Different icing structures and types will be created with the highest quality. Due to the size of the setup, it will be possible to test icing effects on multiple coating samples simultaneously. Furthermore, this setup will enable testing the coatings functionality applied on the actual large sized components. Time to build ice, time to melt ice, ice thickness, ice colour, ice adhesion and droplet impinging will be measured. A 3D scanner and thermal camera will also be used to investigate the icing shapes or other properties in more details.

Sirris immediately translates this knowledge gained during the project to the Flemish industry via the COOCK project Fighting icing in which actual solutions and their implementations to icing related problems are investigated.