Intelligent open test bed for materials tribological characterisation services
Wherever moving bodies are in contact with each other, the respective materials have to show certain friction and wear (tribological) performance. These materials have to fulfil additional functionality and meet ecological, health and safety regulations too. In order to bring novel materials into products, extensive materials characterisation is required. i-TRIBOMAT aims at establishing the world first open test bed of tribological materials characterisation to support industrial innovations among European manufacturing industries and SMEs by upscaling materials to the mechanical components level. i-TRIBOMAT open test bed enables user-driven versatile characterisation of materials at reduced costs by also shortening the time-to-market ca. 5 times. i-TRIBOMAT will realize a unique bundle of shared tribological infrastructure and expertise consisting of >100 tribometers, materials characterisation equipment and additional tools for modelling, protocols, tribo-analytics, design of experiments and online monitoring. i-TRIBOMAT will establish an IT-platform for materials and tribological data harmonisation, management, analytics, sharing and mining. i-TRIBOMAT on its collaboration interface will supply lab-to-field upscaling tools by combining testing with computation, e.g., using artificial intelligence methods, virtual work rooms and surrogate models for various stakeholders, like EUMAT-platform. i-TRIBOMAT services will be validated by three industrially relevant use cases: energy efficiency (transportation), renewable energy (wind turbine) and manufacturing (seals) represented by large-, medium- and small-sized companies. i-TRIBOMAT will be THE European Single Entry Point offering intelligent Tribological Materials Characterisation to predict the durability of materials in use or novel for a wide field of industrial applications. i-TRIBOMAT is expected to cover ≥6.4 % of the dedicated market with a turnover of 9.6 M€ and EBITA objective of 600 k€/year by 2027.