Research & Innovation Projects

MEWLIFE project aims to demonstrate the environmental benefit and economic feasibility of an innovative approach to produce microalgal biomass in an integrated phototrophic and heterotrophic cultivation system using preconcentrated olive oil wastewaters (OMWW) as carbon source for growing algae, thus contributing to waste reuse and valorization.

The EU process industry needs to become less dependent of fossils as source of carbon, and - at the same time - to reduce the greenhouse effect by decarbonizing the economy. Carbon4PUR will tackle the two challenges at the same time by transforming the CO2/CO containing flue gas streams of the energy-intensive industry into higher value intermediates for market-oriented consumer products. The industrially driven, multidisciplinary consortium will develop and demonstrate a novel process based on direct chemical flue gas mixture conversion, avoiding expensive physical separation, thus substantially reducing the carbon footprint, and also contributing to high monetary savings.

The project objective is to develop an open integrated framework that connects materials models at various levels of complexity, experimental data sets and commercial information (e.g. ingredients and processing costs), so that decision makers can rely on a wider variety of key performance indicators. These are combined with multi-criteria optimisation algorithms to identify the optimal trade off when making a business decision, considering appropriate formulation and business constraints.

ProPAT aims to develop novel sensors and analysers for providing measurements on composition, particle size and local bulk properties, as well as more traditional but smart sensors for measuring other process parameters, such as temperature, flowrate, pressure, etc., and integrate them into a versatile global control platform for data acquisition, data processing & mining and User Interface in order to measure properties of process streams and products, accurately and in real-time.

The overall goal of this project is to develop novel, advanced polymer-based raw and composite materials as well as processing and production technologies, towards new families of powder coatings, i.e. one-shot matt powder coatings, responding at the same time to the industrial requirements for quality improvement at lower cost, production of environmentally friendly materials and shorter development cycles.

The overall concept of GRAIL project is the use, exploitation and further development of the state of the art in the field of bio-based products from glycerol and the development research-driven cluster for the use of crude glycerol for the production of high-value platforms, as well as valued end products, harnessing the biotech processes.

BARRIER-PLUS aims at the development of one component waterborne barrier coatings that are competitive in performance to two component coatings.

ECOGEL CRONOS aims at the development of an ecological and innovative coating for composite parts which may be able to eliminate the styrene emissions from the workplace.