The objective of MARKET4.0 is to define, develop and validate an open multi-sided marketplace, based on a trusted P2P data sharing infrastructure for Industry 4.0, that brings together Industrial Product Service Systems (IPSS) providers (supply side) and OEMs as their customers (demand side). It will allow direct interaction among the different sides to improve the sales power of production equipment SMEs. MARKET4.0 will offer advanced web-presence of production equipment SMEs extended by functionalities such as simulations, VR/AR capabilities and a P2P (Industrial Data Space) offering smart user-services and a secure API to try and test the Digital Twin of the production equipment, on top supplier and customer data. This will facilitate direct transactions between market peers (supplier-to-supplier, supplier-to-customer, customer-to-suppliers and more) during the entire B2B lifecycle, i.e. from equipment search to procurement and commissioning. MARKET4.0 will create trust in the business transactions between SME production equipment manufacturers and their customers, as an integral element of the Industrial Data Space (IDS) reference architecture. It includes technological trust (simulation before purchasing), financial trust (Blockchain distributed ledger technology for secure payment), delivery and (anonymized) feedback. In MARKET4.0 the supply side (mainly SMEs) may offer a) production equipment, b) services that extend the capabilities of the production equipment, c) production equipment as a service and d) collaborative engineering services. The marketplace will generate additional value by providing engineering services and acting as a mediator between suppliers and customers.

All the industry from the Polymers Area, change their sourcing strategy due to 2 constraints : fossils resources availability which are the basis of the « regular » Polymers and the incentives in the reduction of the energy consumption. This double motivation drive the car makers R&D Departments and their suppliers to evaluate and use natural fibers reinforcement as an answer to this double objective : their length is by itself a powerful mechanical reinforcement media which also leads to a very interesting density decrease. Also their natural sourcing decrease the fossil resources needs. A great number of R&D collaboratives actions made this challenge happen focusing on the application, the fiber itself as raw material, its preparation, on the characteristics of the fibers based composite for such or such application even on the supply chain, but without accounting on the decohesion phenomena. This is a key step in the compounding stage. Mastering decohesion is important to keep fibers length which is their main attribute as mechanical reinforcement additives. The DEFIBREX project focus on this topic with an ambitious and generic methodology, centered of the natural fibers decohesion phenomena analysis under mechanical constraints. This analysis must lead to a decohesion behavioral model which should be capable to describe a wide types of fibers and mechanical constraints ranges. This model will be validated by experiments run on a variety of fibers.( sourcing, physico-chemical treatments...) with the ambition of proposing the widest global classification of the various used fibers in the industry. To reach these ambitious objectives, the DEFIBREX partnership associate complementary scientific skills (sourcing, pre-treatment with FRD and INRA, process and modelisation with CEMEF and µTomography morphologic analysis (I2M) , with industrial partners (K-TRON, SCC, CLEXTRAL et FAURECIA,) whose contribution will be to help reaching the project objectives and answering questions such as : how to feed a twin-screw extruder without degrading fibers length ? How to set a twin-screw extruder in such a way to maximize mixing efficiency and without degrading fibers length ? What is the functionality increase that can be expected on such injected pieces, and what is the dimensional saving that we can account ? How to deliver and disseminate the behavioral model to industrials users ? To answer those questions, the DEFIBREX project is self organised in 5 work packages : Fibers will be sourced and analyzed on the morphological, mechanical and bio-chemical point of view in WP1. WP2 is dedicated to phenomenological study of the compounding process on a lab scale level with a wide range of fibers types. The compound characterization process by these experiments will be used as input for WP3 whose objective will be to set the behavioral model and its declination as a numerical model in the Twin-Screw extruder simulation program LUDOVIC (as a media for dissemination). In parallel, a fibers classification will be be proposed to establish and sort their polymers reinforcement capability, as well as the compound processability evaluation. The WP 4 is focusing on the industrial scale : fibers feeding, productions of composites samples, compound characterization in order to wider the application range of the behavioral model. Also, the WP4 will produce compound to inject real automobile parts with the objective to evaluate the performance increase of such new parts. This will be achieved in the WP5. Classically, the WP6 will be the project coordination work package. Finally, DEFIBREX is expected to contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the natural fibers decohesion phenomenum and delivering to the manufacturing industry a key technological breaktrough.

Convergence towards renewable energies with low environmental impact is one of today's major societal challenges. Better use of forest resources as an energy source is therefore highly strategic. However, the direct valorization of wood as a raw material is (almost) non-existent in the literature. Recently, however, the industry has adapted pebble presses for wood pellets production. This process makes it possible to recover sawmill by-products, which account for 50% of sawn timber, but only sawdust can be transformed (45% of by-products, alongside chips and bark). What's more, for large-scale heating pellets production, it is mainly suited to the processing of softwoods (36% of the French forest). Finally, raw material has to be transported, still wet (50% of its mass), to production sites that are often far away from sawmills, then ground and dried before processing. Other methods exist, such as "black-pellet" steam cracking, but all require high financial investment (inaccessible to small sawmills and difficult to make profitable given their cutting volume), as well as considerable resources to dry, refine, convey, store and transform the wood. In 2020, Ingénierie des Matériaux Polymères laboratory developed a two-stage extrusion process for converting sawmill by-products, without prior drying or grinding, and without any additives. This approach, based on an original (patented) die system, has several advantages: easy adaptation of process conditions, use of the “natural” water in the wood as a plasticizer/lubricant, taking advantage of the mechanical energy dissipated to transform the wood and partially drying it at the outlet. The pellets produced release more combustion energy and are more resistant to water and mechanical friction, making them highly competitive and easier to transport and store than conventional pellets. All the species tested could be processed, using both sawdust and wood chips as raw materials. However, this raises several scientific questions, such as: (i) how does the composition and morphology of the wood influence the transformations? (ii) how is the material ground, conveyed, transformed, and plasticized in the extruder, without any additives? (iv)how does a high fibers volume fraction paste flow through a channel under grazing shear, then compact to form homogeneous, cohesive granules? and finally (v)what is the energy balance of the process and how can different industrial scales be reached? We propose to tackle these questions through an approach combining process study, physical chemistry, thermodynamics, rheology and modeling. Our aim is to gain a better understanding of the wood material transformations involved, which can eventually be transposed to other biomasses, as well as to model this extrusion process for a highly filled fibrous material, so that it can be adapted to all machine sizes and production volumes, with a particular interest in short distribution circuits.

Related to the metal parts manufacturing, the automotive, aeronautic, nuclear and energy markets require to design lighter parts together with seeking for more and more security and increased life cycles. This antagonist trend is solved by enhancing the overall quality and process fine tuning. As such, the heat treatment, one of the latest process steps is critical. In the same time, environnemental context asks for an almost re-engineered current quenching process by susbstituting the quenching fluids by more environment friendly ones. This implies the absolute necessity of the knowledge and control of the metal parts thermal history all along their manufacturing process paths. This mastering drives to a specific breaktrough : controlling both heating and cooling as a unique continous and integrated process. This is the objective of HECO : the control of the history of industrial parts along their heat treatment, from HEating to COoling. Since years, numerical simulation has been identified as an efficient way to perform this control and optimizing work. The ThosT software, dedicated to the simulation of flow and thermal transfers in furnaces and quenching tanks, is used by industrials to address this issue. It has been found that a next step is needed : to reach the quality control targets, the software must gain a precision increment in simulation the overall process (heating & cooling) as a single problem. It must also incorporate coupled physical phenomena such as radiative heating & cooling and boiling. Considering the variety of equipments and accessories in the industrial plants cnfigurations (fans/burners in furnaces, turbines in quenching tank) and the displacement of the parts from an equipment to another one, the direct numerical simulation is facing new challenges : modeling a growing complexity while keeping the computing time realistic. To solve it, HECO proposes to incorporate reduced order modeling methods (ROM), adaptive moving mesh methods and alternative radiative models (MACZM) to the existing Turbulent Fluid Mechanics solvers of ThosT software. To provide a control and validation scheme, HECO integrates fine experimental investigation of thermal transfer from the furnace to the boiling according to different operating conditions (type of fluid, circulation of quenching flow, displacement of parts). The final stage of HECO is performed via a step by step integration of this work into ThosT software by the software editor partner and coordinator of HECO project. On the other hand, the 6 industrials end-users will validate to finally reach an operational new generation heat treatment simulation software.