ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab, and the two SMEs ATECA and Poly-Shape will combine their research and technological capabilities to propose new ideas in the domain of acoustic liners and in-duct modal detection for air conditioning systems. A modal detection tool adapted to the industrial setup will be proposed and manufactured, to assess the noise source created by the jet pumps of the air system. A compact innovative acoustic liner will be designed in order to mitigate this noise source all over the frequency range, while meeting the strict weight, costs and tight space restrictions. The consortium will benefit of the numerical and experimental capabilities of ONERA, as well as of the complementary technological capabilities of the two SMEs ATECA and Poly-Shape regarding advanced materials & direct manufacturing. The long experience of the partners on these activities will allow to mature innovative liners technologies, and to bring these new concepts from the research laboratory to an industrially relevant environment, ie from TRL 3 to TRL 6, through a close cooperation with the Topic Manager.

Additive manufacturing (AM) offers unprecedented design freedom and the possibility to produce lightweight optimised components that are impossible to make with traditional techniques; or bespoke components that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive if produced in small volumes. Despite the significant progress made in AM, the surface roughness of parts produced by this method continues to be an issue. Rough surface finish on AM parts causes wear, corrosion and fatigue, micro-cracks, poor tolerances, and is aesthetically displeasing. These negative characteristics often outweigh the positive ones of unlimited complexity of shapes and weight reduction benefits. Post-processing finishing methods exist for reducing roughness, but these can be costly and have limited effectiveness, particularly in relation to complex, high surface roughness components. As a result, the application of AM parts in industry is being constricted, particularly in the aerospace and medical industries, where the surface finish of components is highly critical. We have developed PALMS (Plasma Additive Layer Manufacture Smoothing), an innovative cost-effective macro-polishing solution based on novel electrochemical plasma technology. The macro finish (10-50µm) AM parts are rapidly treated in a highly controlled manner in less than 20 minutes, leaving a uniform, smooth micro-finish (<0.1µm), resulting in considerably improved aesthetics and mechanical performance. Our participation in the FTI programme, will allow us to accelerate the commercialisation process for the PALMS TRL6 technology and undertake innovation from the demonstration stage through to market uptake within 32 months after project start. In doing so, we will capture up to 3.0% of the global market by year 5 post project, generating combined revenues of over €68million with an IRR return on investment of 1063%, and the creation of over 160 new jobs.

The project aims to develop a highly-disruptive Technology for an instrument offering Video Observation of Earth: an novel architecture will be demonstrated, based on state of the art technologies for mirrors (freeform), structures (additive manufacturing) & detection (new generation detector & processing chain). It will allow to answer new types of problematics and missions, anticipating the emergence of on-board smart algorithms. The VIDEO project will be a new type of instrument designed to be used with the next generation of on board processing capacity. Due to its specific & innovative technologies and architecture, the VIDEO instrument will be the pathfinder of the next instrument generation for Earth Observation. The VIDEO project proposes a set of breakthrough technologies for Earth Observation instruments, including freeform mirrors, structure in AlSix (low deformation) Additive Manufacturing (with increased demise capacity), as well as a new detection channel with video acquisition. Indeed, the VIDEO project is the future of the small & compact instrument with extra wide field of view. Based on TAS’ exclusive patent combining in a smart optical compact design, the VIDEO instrument will have the capability to perform High Resolution video monitoring on an extremely wide scene. The VIDEO project includes a downscaled instrument that will demonstrate on the ground the functional viability of all these technologies mixed together with an end to end demonstration. All the partners, which are from the European space industry value chain, will be involved in both the development and the demonstrator manufacturing of the VIDEO solution: TASF is the coordinator, designed of the global solution and end-user; Poly-Shape is the additive manufacturing partner; AMOS is the mirrors polisher; Pyxalis is the detector manufacturer; University of Las Palmas is the video processing expert; and TAS-E is the final assembler of the instrument for the end-to-end demonstration

The aim of DREAM is to significantly improve the performances of laser Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) of titanium, aluminium and steel components in terms of speed, costs, material use and reliability, also using a LCA/LCC approach, whilst producing work pieces with controlled and significantly increased fatigue life, as well with higher strength-to-weight ratios. DREAM targets the development of a competitive supply chain to increase the productivity of laser-based AM and to bring it a significant step further towards larger scale industrial manufacturing. In order to upscale the results and to reach an industrial relevant level of productivity, the project is focused on the following four main challenges (i) Part modeling and topology optimization (ii) Raw material optimization to avoid powder contamination (iii) Process optimization, including innovations of the control software of the AM machine, to enable high throughput production (iv) Setup of laser-PBF of nanostructured Titanium alloys with unchanged granulometric dimension for an additional push to higher productivity, since nanostructured metal powders can be sintered with lower energy input and faster speed. The project, thanks to the three end-users involved, is focused on components for prosthetic, automotive and moulding applications to optimize the procedure for three different materials, respectively titanium, aluminium and steel.