The four members of INTEGRA partnership, CTAG, Cidaut, Itene and i2cat, have participated in the web workshop celebrated at the end of the first year of the project. The aim of the event was to explain the technological challenges to introduce the automated driving solutions in the urban environment, to show the technological research lines of the project in the coming years, to show the business opportunities in the automated driving field and to get feed-back from the stakeholders of the urban mobility providers.
The event was opened by Francisco Sánchez, from CTAG, who, as project coordinator, introduced the current scenario and the technological challenges of the automated driving. After the introduction, Rosa Blanco, from CTAG, presented “Red de Excelencia CERVERA” and gave a technical explanation about the importance and the solutions for the automated and connected driving in urban environment. Next, Javier Romo, from Cidaut explained the influence of the automated driving and the new urban scenarios in the safety of the vehicle occupants and of the vulnerable road users, and the need to establish new solutions with from an integral safety point of view. Itene’s intervention, made by Mireia Calvo, was focused on the particularities of the goods delivery based on automated driving solutions, paying special attention to the new opportunities and challenges. The last technical presentation was made by Jesús Alonso, from i2cat, who explained the new simulation tools developed in the project to reproduce the vehicle to everything (V2X) communications and to understand the automated driving influence on the real traffic. After the questions and answers turn, the event was closed by Sergio Güerri from Itene, who was the organizer of the web workshop.
In our commitment to fight climate change, Cidaut is contributing to European Commission’s ambitious policies framed in Green Deal Initiative. The European Climate Pact is an EU-wide initiative inviting people, communities and organisations to participate in climate action and build greener Europe. This initiative is based on connecting and sharing knowledge, learning about climate change, and developing, implementing and scaling up solutions.
In this frame, Cidaut, together with 46 partners, participates in Probono European project. The vision of Probono is to create a people-focused European construction industry that works with a community of stakeholders to create sustainable positive and zero-carbon emitting green buildings and neighbourhoods. The consortium consists of construction actors, public asset service mangers, municipalities, technology solutions providers and experts to transform six European districts into green buildings and neighbourhoods.
The six districts are located in Madrid, Dublin, Aarhus, Brussels, Porto and Prague, where living labs will be implemented to validate Probono’s innovations. The living labs will provide experimentation and innovation environment and will allow testing different solutions for sustainable buildings, circular economy, material up-grading and electromobility. These solutions will be implemented in the coming five years.
The project will provide strong examples of green buildings and neighbourhoods’ technological and social innovation implementation by focusing on building infrastructure and exploiting digitalisation and smart technologies. Probono will create green buildings and neighbourhoods Strategic Planning Tools and provide evidence-based policy recommendations, standardisation actions, and robust adoption and commercialisation strategies. Project work will engage citizens in co-designing and co-delivering sustainable GBNs.
Acknowledgment
The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union (EU) project PROBONO (GA #101037075)
Cidaut together with the partners of Avangard European project is trying to get the answer to this challenging question. One of the objectives of the project is to design an electric vehicle assembly line, with 90% cost reduction relative to a standard carmaker assembly line, to produce modular four wheels electric vehicles and e-bikes.
In order to obtain the ambitious target, IFEVS, as vehicle designer, has adopted a modular solution based on high strength steel tubular design, with highly automated 3D laser cutting and bending processes that have been properly though to avoid mistakes during assembly phase. The manufacturing process also implies the use of innovative 3D printing solutions for both metallic and plastic parts, and also the purchasing and assembly process is controlled by block-chain and cybersecurity solutions to warranty the low cost and efficiency of the project.
Cidaut’s contribution to the project is related to the security of the occupants and also of the vulnerable road users. In the case of the occupant and smart front end has been designed to maximize the energy absorbed and also the passenger spaces has been reinforced to avoid any significant deformation and finally an specific restraint system has been developed adopted to the particularities of these vehicles. In the case of the vulnerable road users’ protection, active and passive measures have been adopted. In the case of the passive solutions the front of the vehicle has been analysed to create “soft” surfaces. In the case of the active, artificial intelligent solutions are being applied to identify vulnerable road users and advice the driver or brake automatically.
Avangard project has completed two out of three years and it is expected that the final answer to the initial question will be yes.
Acknowledgment
The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union (EU) project Avangard (GA #869986)
Fundación CIDAUT has several years being part of the STEM Initiative (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in Spain. This initiative tries to promote the female enrolment in STEM careers. To achieve this objective, huge amount of work is being done to impulse and disseminate information about the professional opportunities that the STEM careers can offer to young students. This dissemination process is performed having advantage of the experience of relevant female researchers, in important positions within the different institutions that collaborate with the initiative, the adequate school guidance through mentoring processes and, of course, counting with the adequate support of the students’ families.
In this framework, CIDAUT has organized on 26 of January a workshop titled “Passive vehicle safety, correct and incorrect use of seat belts”, that was imparted by Mrs. Susana Escalante, Industrial Engineer and Director of the CIDAUT Impact Testing Department. The workshop was focused to 16 young high school female students with the intention of raise the awareness about researching inside vehicle safety systems and Intelligent Transport technologies.
In this sense, thanks to the INTEGRA national project, in which the Center is currently taking part, they have been able to discover how autonomous vehicles, capable of imitating human behaviour regarding handling and control, perceiving the environment that surrounds them, are going to become real in a next future.
OSIRIS is an ambitious national project whose main objective is to promote a strategic cooperation in recycling and recovery technologies to improve the circular economy of composites and complex plastic materials with high added value, a work that began last January.
This three-year project in which four Technology Centers participate: AIMPLAS (Technological Institute of Plastics), AITEX (Textile Research Institute), CIDAUT (Foundation for Transport and Energy Research and Development) and GAIKER (GAIKER Foundation), is financed by the CDTI (Centre for Industrial Technological Development), through the Ministry of Science and Innovation, in the context of the grant of aid for Technological Centers of Excellence “Cervera” (CER-20211009).
The consortium is working together, sharing experiences, solutions and good practices that contribute to improving recycling technologies for composite and complex plastic materials. Technologies in which the members of the consortium have been working in recent years and their corresponding results have allowed them to be recognized as “CERVERA Centers of Excellence”. The OSIRIS NETWORK, formed by these excellent Technological Centers, has the objective of positioning itself as a reference network both nationally and internationally, leading to the growth of the R+D+i projects and technology transfer to the business and industrial fabric.
To achieve this objective, the network is centred on three strategic technological approaches: technology for waste recycling, recovery of intermediate products and post-processing of intermediate products into final products. On the advances of these scientific bases, led by more than 84 researchers and technicians from the whole network, the strategy of national and international dissemination, the training and the attracting talents, the attracting companies and the planning of new R+D+i projects is supported. All of the above aims to contribute with a global and strengthened vision to the challenges of the present and the future with respect to the recycling of complex raw materials.
All the advances of the OSIRIS NETWORK can be soon followed in the website: www.redosiris.com
Last 27th October 2021, the follow-up meeting of the MEDUSA 300 Phase I Project took place in the offices of the General Sub-Directorate for Planning, Technology and Innovation (SDG PLATIN) of the Ministry of Defence. The members of the MEDUSA Joint Venture, together with their collaborator the Fluid Physics Laboratory of the UNED, satisfactorily presented the results achieved related to the scaling, the optimisation of components and the design of 1 kW technological demonstrators. MEDUSA Joint Venture is a temporary union of companies constituted by the CIDAUT Foundation and JALVASUB Engineering to carry out the Phase I of the MEDUSA 300 Project.
The milestone reached is of great importance for the development of the next phases of the Project. It means having demonstrated the national technological and industrial capacity required to start, with all the guarantees and without risk, the manufacture of the PEM fuel cell demonstrators. This demonstration is intended to be on the real scale required for the S-80 submarine and with functional features achieved that even exceed those specified in the project.
This project will develop the fuel cell system for the AIP S-80 Spanish submarines, which will be based on the innovative design of the ULPHE-PEM (Ultra-Light Platinum Content High Efficient- PEM Fuel Cell). The ULPHE-PEM fuel cell is a new generation of polymeric fuel cells, which can operate both at low and high temperatures, and which is based on a completely Spanish-patented technology, more efficient and with lower weight, volume, and cost than those presently existing on the market.
In the frame of the European Project Multi-Moby, and with the relevant collaboration of IFEVS and Nanomotion and the participation of the whole consortium, Cidaut is developing an integral solution to protect the vulnerable road users in the new urban mobility.
This new mobility is electric, automated, connected and shared and attending to these trends the implementation of small urban electric vehicles is becoming a reality in large cities. These vehicles present two characteristics that increase the potential hazards for the vulnerable road users, the first one is the low noise emission and the second one is the geometry. Due to their reduced size, in the event of an accident with a vulnerable road user, their head will impact on the screen shield of the vehicle, which is a hard component that may cause damage to this kind of users. The preliminary results of the project have demonstrated that it is possible to reduce the damage of the users in legs, knees and pelvis, but it is very difficult to obtain acceptable values in the head working only on passive safety solutions.
One of the first conclusions of the project, attending to vulnerable road users’ protection, is that it is mandatory to integrate active and passive safety solutions. The active safety solutions of Multi-Moby project are based on artificial intelligence. Nanomotion is developing a gimball, able to work in the visible and infra-red field, to recognize vulnerable road users and determine the potential risk of an accident. Depending on the degree of automation of the vehicle the gimball will inform the driver of the potential risk all it will send directly a message to the vehicle for braking. The intensity of the signal to be sent will be equivalent to the relevance of the risk.
The implementation of this solution will suppose an important reduction in the number of accidents involving vulnerable road users, and in those cases where the accident is unavoidable, it will happen at a lower speed, minimizing the damage.
Multi-Moby has covered one, out of three years, and important improvements are expected in relation to urban electric mobility, not only on safety but also on sustainability thanks to innovative solutions in power train, battery charging and energy harvesting.
Acknowledgment
The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union (EU) project MULTI-MOBY (GA #101006953)
On the 17th of November, CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial) has organized a meeting between relevant stakeholders in the automotive sector from Spain and Ohio in order to find synergies between both regions.
The main objective of the event is to present the technological capabilities of the automotive sector, both from Spain and Ohio, and promote technological cooperation between Spanish and American entities in this technological field. The event has consisted of a first part in which the sector in Spain and the State of Ohio have briefly exposed and, subsequently, the technological capabilities of the Spanish and American entities participating in the event have been briefly presented.
The institutional opening has corresponded to Mr. Jonathan Bridges. Managing Director, Automotive, Steel, & White Goods at JobsOhio and Mr. Javier Ponce, General Manager at CDTI. After the introduction to the event, it has been the turn of the Spanish participants, where Cecilia Median from Sernauto has made a quick and precise overview of the Spanish automotive sector; Javier Romo from Cidaut has presented Integra Consortium, where four research and development centers, Cidaut, CTAG, Itene and i2cat, are collaborating to foster the implementation of safe and resilient automated driving solutions; Rodrigo Castiñeira from Indra Sistemas has explained their vision of mobility in the horizon 2030; José Manuel Mínguez from Ferroglobe Innovation has presented charging infrastructure solutions and new evolutions on lithium ion batteries; José Jesús Molinero, from Begas Motor has presented innovative solutions for sustainable mobility in cities oriented to the development of new power train configurations; Luke Stedke from Drive Ohio has shown success cases in the region of Ohio related to automated, connected, electrified and shared mobility; and Eric Philips from Union County and Marysville has presented the smart mobility corridor developed in the route 33.
The closing remarks were made by Mrs. María J. Fernández. Trade Commissioner. Trade Commission of Spain in Chicago. Embassy of Spain in the USA. Additional actions are planned to enhance collaborations at both side of the Atlantic to foster the integration of innovative mobility solutions.
The Spanish Railway Technology Platform (PTFE), whose technical secretariat is provided by the Spanish Railways Foundation, held its 16th Annual Assembly at the headquarters of the Spanish Railways Foundation on 17 November. This year the assembly returned to its normal on-site format. The meeting was chaired by Enrique Playán, Director of the Spanish Research Agency of the Ministry of Science and Innovation and José Carlos Domínguez Curiel, Manager of the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles.
Within the framework of the European Year of the Railway, the PTFE focused its debate on national and international R&D&I strategies, support instruments for the sector and the disruptive innovation vectors that will drive the railway mode in its consolidation as the backbone of sustainable, connected and safe mobility.
As usual in the PTFE Annual Assembly, the meeting included a specific session for the exhibition of innovative projects that ratify the capabilities of the ecosystem and have a positive impact on the competitiveness of the sector. Technology developments and new elements were presented by leading researchers and experts from different organisations.
On behalf of CIDAUT, Alfonso Horrillo contributed with the advances being made on renewable ammonia and bioethanol as hydrogen carriers in the railway. These developments will go deeper into the possibilities that the use of this energy will favour even more the energy efficiency that characterises the railway mode.
The 16th Annual Assembly ended with the presentation of the innovation strategies of two of the benchmark driving forces for the Spanish railway sector: RENFE and ADIF. The significant impact on the decline in rail transport caused by COVID-19, the liberalisation process, the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the development of ERJU (Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking), etc., have led to a review of the strategies of railway operators and managers in which the commitment to innovation is going to be a transcendental factor.
The most relevant innovation strategies and projects (own, collaborative and win win) were presented by Pilar Gorriz, Renfe’s Innovation Manager and José Conrado Martínez, Deputy Director of Innovation, both of whom explained their open approach to collaboration in the development of their innovation with the sector. Their organisations have a high potential to lead and undertake competitive and business processes that involve bringing innovations to the market with a greater potential for success.
Last November, two relevant events took place at national and European level in the field of energy and hydrogen, which CIDAUT had the opportunity to attend.
On 16, 17 and 18 November, the 24th edition of the Energy and Environment Fair, GENERA, was held in Madrid. The Spanish Hydrogen Association, AeH2, organised on 16 November, in collaboration with the Spanish Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform (PTE HPC), the conference ‘Green Hydrogen: towards a sustainable energy system’, which was attended by CIDAUT.
This day began with a brief welcome by Miguel Peña, secretary of AeH2, followed by a short introduction by Javier Brey, president of the Association, who began by stating that “interest in hydrogen in Spain is growing exponentially, not only in industry, but also among the population. This interest is more than justified due to the great potential of these technologies to move towards the decarbonisation of our economy”.
Subsequently, two round tables were held with the presence of representatives from the main entities involved in the hydrogen sector. The first round table, with the participation of Carlos de la Cruz Molina, Director of Evaluation and Technological Cooperation of the CDTI, and Santiago González, Head of Renewable Hydrogen in the Department of Regulatory Framework and Corporate Strategy of the IDAE, debated hydrogen as a reactivator of the economy. The second round table was entitled: “Accelerating the development of hydrogen in Spain”. It was attended by the directors and heads of the hydrogen areas of the AeH2 promoter partners.
At European level, the European Hydrogen Week 2021 (EHW 2021) was held in Brussels from 29 November to 3 December. In this edition a hybrid organisation between on-site and online was chosen. CIDAUT attended virtually to the different presentations that took place.
The Week discussed the tremendous opportunities associated with the production and use of hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels in the different sectors of the economy and how hydrogen will play a key role in the European Green Deal. The EHW2021 marked the public launch of the Clean Hydrogen Partnership – as the successor of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU). This edition featured sessions on the future research and deployment priorities for Clean Hydrogen as well the FCH JU Programme Review Days and the FCH JU Awards. The week will also saw the third European Clean Hydrogen Alliance Forum uniting its 1500 members. Topics covered the entire value chain needed to realise the hydrogen economy, scaling-up production, infrastructure, and end-use sectors, research and innovation priorities as well as skills and education.
