Abstract
Wear and corrosion protection plays a crucial role effort of European Manufacturing Industries to maximise both efficiency and productivity because is inherently related to the lifetime of the components and their manufacturing cost. Thermal Spray technologies for deposition of Hardmetals were developed for this reason, which is to provide higher resistance to sliding and abrasive wear, coupled with good corrosion resistance. In this field innovation is based on experimental trial-and-error and operational feedback because the equations that can model the coating performance have to consider the mechanical properties of the hard phase and those of the metal binder, their microstructure and interaction, their evolution during the non-equilibrium Thermal Spray process. The final coating properties depend on all these factors and more, and they are too many for a physical modelling workflow to provide reliable results on a time scale that is compliant with industrial changes to fluctuating markets, supply chains and regulations. On the other hand, tools based on experimental data that relies only on final coating macro properties require extensive datasets to be reliable, which again conflict with the response time required by industrial innovation. Moreover, innovation in coating technology is not just a matter of performance and costs: industrial companies have to consider multiple other factors such as the impact on workers, hidden regulatory costs, environmental protection costs, and also general public opinion. CoBRAIN offers a solution to this need, exploiting the integration of computational and experimental data through semantic interoperability, and developing an intelligent tool that will be able to propose novel materials from the class of High Entropy Hardmetals for direct deposition by HVOF, HVAF and CGS Thermal Spray, and capable to estimate their impact on the economy and the environment.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Emanuele Ghedini
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale
Dipartimento di Informatica - Scienza e Ingegneria
Coordinator:
Università degli Studi di MODENA e REGGIO EMILIA(Italy)
Other Participants:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna
(Italy)
Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 5.149.553,00
Project Duration in months: 48
Start Date:
01/01/2023
End Date:
31/12/2026
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101092211