The European aerospace, automotive, and rail industries are committed to improving their energy efficiency to meet targets set within the EU’s climate, energy and transport policies. This is motivating the increased use of lightweight composite materials in lieu of heavier metallics. To implement this transition, these industries must reach, at least, the same level of crash performance achieved with metals, but at significantly lower weight and without increasing cost. This is viewed by industry as an exceptionally challenging goal and will require highly trained engineers, versed in the myriad aspects of designing cost-effective, crashworthy composites structures, and capable of harnessing the latest research developments in the fast-changing world of composites. The ICONIC ETN aims to cultivate such a new generation of young engineers; comfortable and fluent in the integration and exploitation of knowledge from fields as diverse as materials science, chemistry, computational methods, solid and damage mechanics, textile technology, structural design and optimisation. These researchers will acquire the skills to enable the sustainable and economically-viable design of a new generation of highly efficient, lightweight transportation composite structures that will provide the maximum protection to occupants through superior crashworthiness. 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) will be recruited to take up posts, across the UK, Ireland, Greece, Germany, Italy and Sweden, in an innovative, multidisciplinary and intersectoral structured research and training programme. ICONIC is supported by a strong consortium from academia, large industrial enterprises and innovative SMEs. A comprehensive training and secondment programme (including joint supervision and industrial mentoring) will equip researchers with additional transferable skills to ensure future employability and career progression.

In order to maintain the leadership of the European aeronautics, the SuCoHS project will investigate potential weight and cost savings in expanding the use of composite materials in areas of demanding high thermal conditions (high temperature and fire). In particular, this project envisages new structural concepts with novel multi-material composites to provide high resistivity against thermal, mechanical and fire loading. These developments also cater for high production rates, providing a cost competitive manufacturing process at minimum material and energy consumption, while reducing the requirement for visual inspection or rework. New solutions for structural health monitoring are considered within the structures to enable condition-based maintenance taking into account actual loading and structural conditions. Instead of an isolated investigation of innovative technologies the project will develop an integrated framework for the adaption of these promising technologies to different aeronautic components to increase efficiency during design, manufacturing and operation. Three industrial use cases are defined from real industrial design challenges to set requirements, to validate new technologies and to demonstrate technical feasibility near to operation environment: a high temperature resistance nacelle component, a composite aircraft interior shell and a tail cone panel substructure. The SuCoHS project gathers 14 partners from 7 European countries, amongst which 2 technical universities, 3 research centers, 4 SMEs and 8 large companies. The requested EU funding amounts to 6 638 944 Euros for a 3-year project duration.