Surface Engineering

The aim is to promote a more sustainable industry and reduce dependence on materials from outside the European Union.

A hull for a six-meter-long electric boat and rotor blades for wind plants will be built using natural fibres and bio-based resins.

The use of carbon or glass fibre-based composites presents a number of difficulties in terms of recycling and dependence on third countries: 98% of these synthetic composites end up in landfills and nearly 80% of the raw materials are currently manufactured outside Europe. To reverse this situation, the BioStruct project aims to develop and validate new manufacturing processes for composites reinforced with natural fibres and bio-based resins.

Currently, these more sustainable materials are used in less critical applications that do not require high performance in terms of mechanical performance. To give new qualities to the new composites, a precise draping process will be developed to control the orientation of the fibres, creating material models that detect the natural variability of the material and integrating bio-based nanostructured sensors for load control.

In this line, CIDETEC Surface Engineering is working on a bio-based disassemblable epoxy adhesive, thanks to its patented 3R technology (recyclable, repairable and reprocessable) that will facilitate the recycling of materials. The Vigo-based company Amura will use the adhesive for the construction of a six-metre electric propulsion boat hull. Another use case of the project will involve the construction of full-size rotor blades for wind power plants.

BioStruct, funded by the Horizon Europe initiative with eight million euros and led by Profactor (Austria), envisages a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of between 2.5 and 4.3 million tonnes of CO2 per year through the use of biocomposite materials.

Along with CIDETEC Surface Engineering and Amura, Abele Ingenieure (Germany), Bladeworks (Italy), Enginsoft (Italy), Ideko (Spain), Lumoscribe (Cyprus), NOMA Resins (Poland) and Techtera (France) are participating in the project.

The system has been designed by the project to detect defects generated by corrosion in oil and gas installations.

The components for the setup of a pipeline demonstrator designed by members of the CUIDETEC (Corrosion Under Insulation DETECtion and prediction in steel pipes) project consortium arrived to the CIDETEC Surface Engineering facilities. This Project aims to develop a procedure for the maintenance of oil and gas installations based in an automated system with hardware and software tools for the management of the pipelines and equipment integrity affected by Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI). The system has been designed to detect, localize, and quantify defects generated by corrosion. The demonstrator is currently installed in the terrace

of CIDETEC Surface Engineering building. Prior to the heat-insulation setup, artificial defects were generated on the pipes to simulate the CUI. The goal is to undergo this demonstrator to thermal cycles, simulating the conditions of an operating pipeline in the oil and gas sector for at least one year.

Detection tests of corrosion defects have been carried out by using Non Destructive Techniques, including a pulsed current transducer and an electromagnetic acoustic transducer which, combined, allow to measure through the insulation, estimate the defects dimensions due to CUI and generate a mapping of the wall thickness over the detected areas.

CUIDETEC is an international project whose participants are Innerspec Technologies UK, Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon GmbH, Nuromedia GmbH, Robolan robotic engineering, Design Business & Verification Services (DBV), and CIDETEC Surface Engineering.

This Project is funded by the joint program Eurostars-3 with co-funding of CDTI, and the Research and Innovation Europe Horizon Framework Program of the European Union. Its execution period started in January of 2023 and will end in December of 2024. Its execution period started in January of 2023 and will end in December of 2024.

A project progress meeting was hosted by CIDETEC Surface Engineering last February.