Circular

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Designing circular industrial systems for the Industry of the Future.

The project aims at developing reliable circular industrial systems able to transform post-used products into new added-value products. The consortium will build the right conditions, as well as the new digital technologies required for creating largescale circular production systems. Circular will contribute to the development of methods and technologies for the Industry of the Future paradigm and to their implementations.

Challenges

Industrial systems will have to face the main Industry of the Future challenges: resource scarcity, energy efficiency, customization expectations, job quality required by the fourth industrial revolution, etc. This project will show that circular industrial systems give companies the ability to propose new high-added-value products while minimizing the use of material and energy resources. As an example, batteries in the automotive sector (800,000 tons/year on the european market) can be transformed into batteries for other electical equipments, benefiting the 80% of the non-used performance. To achieve this, circular industrial systems will have to be really agile facing different scientific obstacles as the real human/machine collaboration, the implementation of the numerical solutions, and the design and implementation of the new necessary organizations.

Interdisciplinarity

This project gathers 12 research teams and 3 technological platforms from Engineering Sciences, Informatics and Mathematics, and Human and Social Sciences that will work together to tackle the pluridisciplinary scientific challenges addressed by the Industry of the Future. Indeed, it is necessary to build a scientific community able to use the innovations related to the numerical sciences and technologies (big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, virtual/augmented reality ...), while considering the role of Humans in the industry, as well as the new professions within the organization of future industries.

Project organization...

The Industry of the Future paradigm requires evolving the way in which products are designed, produced, distributed and recycled in order to face economical, societal and environmental challenges. We want to move towards a circular economic “take-make-consume-reuse” model instead of a classical linear “take-make-consume-dispose” model. This paradigm change needs a new way to answer the raised research questions. Then, different research teams will work together to be able to consider both new technologies and their usage. In fine, the objectve is to create a research group able to answer questions from the industrial world, particularly concerning the agility of the future productive systems.

... and its international visibility

The overarching industrial countries have set up huge Industry of the Future programs for the next 5 years and work closely with universities and research laboratories. So, numerous research centers have been established in several countries in order to address Industry of the Future paradigm issues. However, those researches mainly focus on the design and the implementation of new disruptive technologies. In this framework, the project consortium has the strong ambition to develop a sustainable multidisciplinary research and industrial network to address the circular industrial system issues at local, national and international levels. The objective is to launch several ambitious projects with the main renowned international universities in the field and the relevant industrial networks. The Circular project will be a key factor in supporting the construction of the multidisciplinary network that will give Univ. Grenoble Alpes a high visibility in the field of the Industry of the Future paradigm.

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