IAMAT - Introduction of advanced materials technologies into new product development for the mobility industries

Many technological innovations are related to the development of new materials. However, material development takes a large amount of time from the development phase to market itself, being significantly costly. Hence, reducing time to market promotes economic growth by reducing a very important barrier of product development.

To mitigate the risk associated with material deployment into to the market, this project aims to develop an integrated framework for evaluating design alternatives that allows the product development process to exploit potential advanced materials. The research proposes to apply this framework to a testbed related to the industrial activity of the two factories of the airspace industry located in Portugal.

The unique aspect of the proposed project is that it intends to integrate important considerations into a coherent overall approach for the design, manufacturing and implementation of new materials and structurally optimized solutions. The idea is to demonstrate how this integrated approach can be applied generally to mobility and other industries, as a way of making the integration of new lighter and stronger materials more efficient and timely, in a sustainable way across the supply chain. To do so, the project is divided into five work packages (WP): computational materials morphologies, sustainable multifunctional structures, management of uncertainty, supply chains towards sustainability and testbed.