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Calcifying organisms such as the sea urchin make use of amorphous precursors of CaCO3 during the initial times of formation of their shells and skeletons. This amorphous precursor strategy offers a cheap alternative through the free energy of formation pathway, because these solids are easily formed

HEALTHYGLASS will determine innovative silicon oxide and oxynitrides (SiOxNy) coatings applied on the internal surface of pharmaceutic vials, in order to obtain efficient and sustainable barrier properties. The targeted function of these coatings is to limit the interaction between the stored drug a

The main ambition of the ULTRACELL project is to provide proof of the feasibility of a new industrial adhesive-free assembling process or bio-based heat-sealable layers. The process developed should have performance comparable to assemblies obtained by adhesive or heat sealable layer used today, in

The main objective of the DIPLOX project is to study the effect of plastic deformation on bulk and grain boundary diffusion in a temperature range including low temperatures where the bulk diffusion cannot be measured easily (350-750 °C). The results obtained will be used as input data for modeling

In Japan, there is a great need to develop quickly NDT methods able to be deployed in very harsh environments, especially in the objective of Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant decommissioning. A safe process for disassembling complex piping systems requires new tools and techniques to detect and qua

In fusion welding processes, metallic materials of dissimilar type, nature or properties are joined in order to develop a single part with new functionalities. However, during the cooling process, the solidification stage leads to the development of particular material defects inside the weld bead d

Thermal processing is an established energy-intensive process in the milk/egg sectors, as every milk or egg product is heated at least once when transformed. The major issue of these heat treatments is however the formation of fouling deposits on the stainless-steel based heat exchangers surfaces. F

Robocasting is a 3D printing technique that can provide complex multimaterials parts by successive deposition of layers of powder-filled pastes. Microwave sintering uses the coupling of ceramic materials with an oscillating electro-magnetic field. It is attractive because it is quick, it has a low e

ToughGlasses is a fundamental PRC research project motivated by the need to improve and assess the glasses mechanical durability over the long term. Glasses are integral parts of our daily lives (buildings, cars, dishes…) along with being integral parts of heat resistant technologies, protection pa

Chernobyl accident fallout and major radioactive water leaks from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant arouse concerns regarding the potential radioactive contamination of aquatic systems nearby and set a necessity for a reliable risk assessment tool in case of accidental radioactive di

To ensure the mechanical strength of metal / elastomer assembly, metal is coated with bonding agents on which the vulcanized elastomer is in situ deposited. The need for high performance has led to the complexity of the often manual repetitive application processes of one or more adhesive layers. Th

The main advantage of Interpenetrating Polymer Network (IPN) for industrial application is to combine within a single material the properties of the two kinds of polymer networks generated by two different processes ie. cationic and radical polymerization. With the emphasis on resource and energy co

Understanding of Negative Gas Adsorption Behavior of Flexible Nanoporous Materials Besides the fundamental interest of the intriguing NGA phenomenon, there are possible technological applications (micro-pneumatic components and mechanical actuators) since the material’s deflation is a strong respon

The extreme miniaturization in modern technology calls for deeper insights into the non-conventional, fluctuation dominated mechanics of materials at micro- to nano-scales. At these scales, the nature of dislocation-mediated plasticity changes radically: sub-micron metallic samples exhibit high, but

Thin films of anatase titanium oxide were extensively studied due to their unique properties: photocatalysis under UV exposure, self-cleaning, anti-fogging, anti-bacterial… Various deposition processes compatible with deposition on glass were developed: sol-gel, sputtering or conventional chemical v

MILAGaN aims at developing electrically pumped microdisk-lasers covering the UV-visible range based on group III-nitrides (Al,Ga,In)-N. Several applications are envisioned as a result of this project: water/air purification/disinfection, environmental sensing, and fabrication of ever more efficient

This project involves a collaboration between the R&D Center for Membrane Technology in Taiwan and the Laboratoire de Génie Chimique in Toulouse (France). It aims at designing a new process for the ultra purification of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), a very promising drug which has to be ext

This project is dedicated to a bottom-up approach to optimize the design of porous electrode materials devoted to biofuel cells and biosensors. These devices operate on the basis of complex enzymatic electrochemical redox reactions coupled to mass transfer of substrates (glucose and O2) and electron

The aim of this project is to provide a predictive description of water transport in soft porous materials. Soft matter is indeed subjected to several interplaying effects that influence transport at the nanoscale: surface heterogeneities due to hydrophilicity/hydrophobicity of the confining surface

Fibre lasers and amplifiers have grown considerably through their uses in industry (materials processing), civil engineering (sensors) and medical (LASIK), to name few examples. Such fibres rely on the doping of the glass by luminescent ions, generally rare-earth ions. As the luminescent properties

In industrial silicate glasses, chemical diffusion of elements plays an important role at all steps of the glass melting and transformation processes. Specifically, chemical diffusion controls the inter-diffusion between thin films and the glass substrate when heating tempered or curved glass above

Design of a controlled-cohesion granular material. Setup of Design and qualification of a controlled-cohesion granular material, unsensitive to humidity. Development of a cohesive DEM code. Indentification of relevant dimensionless numbers. Various experimental tests on flows and rheology. Calibrati

The recovery of metals from WEEE, Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment, is becoming a major challenge to preserve natural metal resources while treating a large amount of waste. Available recycling processes present several drawbacks : pyrometallurgy, based on a smelting process, is highly

Tablets are the most popular pharmaceutical dosage form. They are manufactured in the industry using a die compaction process and the compacted powders have typical grain size around 100µm. Tablets must fulfill a lot of requirements. Among them, the mechanical strength is of particular importance as

This fundamental project deals with the development of a coherent instrumentation to monitor the polymerisation of functionalized carbosilanes, to lead to ceramic precursors. The idea is to access rheological, infrared and Raman spectroscopy and multi-angle light scattering data (MALS), in order to

This project is concerned with the fundamental study of an innovative damage detection and imaging method for structural monitoring. The principle is based on the use of ambient acoustic and vibrational noise as a substitute to incident ultrasound waves generated in conventional nondestructive testi

The objectives of the project were to develop the growth and study the functional oxides on low-cost substrates using 2 approaches: combinatorial epitaxy substrates and nanosheets seed layer (2D-NS). These two types of substrates have the advantage of being synthesized for a wide variety of oxide fa

Self-healing Ceramic-Matrix Composites (SH-CMCs) have extremely long lifetimes even under severe thermal, mechanical and chemical solicitations. They are made of ceramic fibres embedded in a brittle ceramic matrix subject to multi-cracking, yielding a “damageable-elastic” mechanical behaviour. The c

The SPOT project aims to develop one or more reactive plasma etching processes to realize micro or nano-patterns on austenitic or martensitic stainless steels. By combining intrinsic or chemical surface properties with the physical ones generated by patterning, innovative or improved functionalities

The present project is motivated by the flawed nature of current engineering ceramics and it aims at studying and developing new lightweight damage-tolerant ceramics. Designing cellular materials with a hierarchical structure similar to natural lightweight materials combined with the use of damage-t

The ever increasing demands in terms of performance have led mechanical systems and moving components to work under extreme contact conditions, intense contact pressures (> 2 GPa) and/or relative sliding velocities (> 2 m/s) and/or low or elevated temperatures (-200

A gel is a soft solid composed of two intertwined phases: a solid network and a liquid solvent. The rupture of these soft heterogeneous materials is not well understood despite its importance in the mouth feel - thus the success - of most food industry products, as well as the lifetime of next-gener

The main goal of this project is the fabrication of sensors based on a new transistors architecture called Electrolyte-Gated Organic Field-Effect Transistors (EGOFETs) on flexible substrates exclusively by means of inkjet-printing. The main barriers addressed by our project are: - the reduction of

Diesel Oxidation Catalysts (DOC) was developed to oxidize CO and hydrocarbons. NO oxidation is also expected reach the NO2/NOx ratios suitable for the downstream system of Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) of NOx by ammonia or urea. The CORAL consortium will contribute to finely tune the composi

The global shift towards a greener economic model requires replacing non-renewable chemicals with sustainable ones, whose performance at least matches that of their predecessors while they meet the most up-to-date norms. Rapid standard adaptability is critical in many fields such as cosmetics, oil r

Recently, additive manufacturing and topology optimization allowed a rupture in material sciences called “material by design” where it becomes possible to design and fabricate materials with a given microstructure. Such materials are referred to as architectured materials because their effective pro

The project will study new 3D printing capabilities resulting from the development of a new resin with an efficiency of polymerization that increases nonlinearly with CW light irradiance. It will be a stereolithographic 3D printing technique, but different from UV photopolymerization, that uses t

The design of lightweight, stiff and highly damped panels is an important issue in mechanical engineering (for aeronautical and aerospace applications for example). Composite and architected materials are some answers to this problem. The insertion of acoustic black holes (ABH), which are vibration

The control of surface chemistry or interface is one of the key steps in the control of nanotechnology and photonics industry for high added values components. This fact is generally observed for the III-V semiconductors (III-Vs) where it is still difficult to achieve their exceptional performances

The pixelated sintering technique uses a resistive heating «mold« as a modular «oven«. The heating elements are arranged around the part to be sintered based on multi-physics modeling. The basic unit consists of a power supply, a resistive heating element, and a thermocouple placed close to the samp

This research proposal aims at understanding the ROle of DIscoNnections in grain-boundary-based plasticity (RODIN). Grain boundaries (GBs) are the defects that separate two domains possessing different crystallographic orientations (commonly called "grains"). They are found in most of the metals, al

Engineering metamaterials showing unorthodox behaviors with respect to wave propagation are recently attracting attention for their innumerable astonishing applications. We are particularly interested in those metamaterials that can inhibit wave propagation in particular frequency ranges which are k

In the pursuit of lighter materials and optimized thin-walled components for transportation, knowledge about the characteristic ductile damage mechanisms in metal sheets is key.As the study of damage in materials has, up to now, been focussed on proportional loading, the strain-damage interaction is

We propose a large-scale computational screening of defects in semiconductors. The project will be the first to inter-relate growth conditions, defect types and concentrations, and functional transport properties. The study will combine several approaches developed by the two project partners and st

The recent Photonics boom, with applications in different sector from health to telecommunication or security, generates new horizons but also tremendous challenges to undertake. The PROTEus project focuses on 3D laser printing and multi-materials multifunctional fibers, combining glass, glass-ceram

The main objective of this project is to explore new carbon compounds using high pressure as a stabilization tool for newly theoretically predicted “polymerized” anionic carbon states. For example 3-D clathrate superstructures are expected to have mechanical properties comparable to diamond, typical

One of the elementary physical mechanisms implied at the first stage of corrosion fatigue processes in presence of hydrogen in nickel is investigated during the CRACKHINIT project. Here, we focus on the hydrogen embrittlement phenomenon during fatigue, which has many implications for the durability

CellsInFoams uses an ice-templating technique (freeze casting) to develop bacteria-containing materials able to outperform the current solutions in soil bioremediation. The project aims at developing macroporous materials with precisely controlled morphology to encapsulate environmental relevant bac

Simultaneous control of adhesion strength and detachment dynamics of soft adhesive materials is a key improvement lever for industrial applications especially during assembly and converting processes. AdhesiPS is a fundamental research program that investigates how substrates patterned with micro-st

Encapsulation aims to protect fragile active molecules (e.g. therapeutic proteins, drugs,..) or living cells from external degradation conditions and offers at the same time their sustained local delivery, enhancing the bioavailability of encapsulated active compounds and life-span of cells. Thus, t

The main objective of the project is to widen the possibilities of creating new chemical structures from oligosaccharide blocks. Polysaccharides are very abundant natural polymers, inexpensive, renewable, stable, and modifiable hydrophilic biopolymers that have biological and chemical properties suc

Single-layered surface covalent organic frameworks (SCOFs) are a new class of porous polymers with structural periodicity in the skeleton and predesignable pore parameters. Up to now, most of the SCOFs have been prepared by Ullmann dehalogenation reactions of brominated aromatic compounds or trimeri

In the last past years, Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes have been intensively developed leading to a revolution in many industrial sectors. These processes offer the possibility of developing parts of complex geometry and high mechanical strength, with short manufacturing times and with import

The RAP project addresses the problem of recycling and recovery of permanent magnets based on rare earths, dominated by more than 95% by neodymium-iron-boron (Nd-Fe-B) magnets. Nd-Fe-B magnets find their place in many domestic and industrial applications through electrical and electronic equipments

Because of their high recovery to mechanical deformation, polyurethane elastomers are used for a large number of applications, going from automotive sectors to building. However, there is a clear economical need to further improve these materials towards three additional properties: adhesion, self-h

Light Emitting Diodes (LED) based on nitrides are very efficient and worldwide used for solid state lighting. In the ultraviolet, however, their wall plug efficiency remains severely limited by the p doping problem in AlGaN. This intrinsic problem can be circumvented by inserting a tunnel junction,