Many of the challenges faced by small and medium sized EU shipyards can be addressed by improving their productivity for fabricating new, high technology vessels and increasing their access to the specialist repair and maintenance market. Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is a high integrity, low distortion, environmentally benign, welding technique, which was previously investigated in FP7 project HILDA (High Integrity Low Distortion Assembly) and recommended for shipbuilding due to its high quality and suitability for automation. A recent break-through in the tooling material available for FSW now shows potential to enable this process for welding of steel structures (traditionally it has only been possible to use FSW in aluminium) – this represents a huge opportunity to improve the productivity of European shipyards. In RESURGAM, will combine FSW with the new tool material to deliver: • The introduction of low cost friction stir welding (FSW) systems for steel that can be retrofitted to their existing CNC machines; • The introduction of AI enabled, robotic FSW systems capable of making underwater weld repairs. These fabrication and repair capabilities, backed by the secure, digital Industry 4.0 infrastructure and techniques already in widespread use in the automotive and aerospace industries, will facilitate the rapid, coordinated but distributed modular manufacture of ships and watercraft throughout Europe. Practically, this will allow ships damaged anywhere in the world will have the option of being repaired in place without the need to travel to the nearest dry dock. This will allow ship owners to choose the most suitable yards to conduct their repairs rather than the nearest, and the repairs may be undertaken by yards with no dry dock of their own thus significantly increasing the number of yards able to undertake such work. All of this will implemented by the European shipyards and Naval architects in Europe.

BIOSAFIRE goes back to nature to upgrade lignins and tannins, nature’s flame retardants, and unlock them for industrial application of biosbased flame retardants. Starting from already existing pilot plants, BIOSAFIRE upscales and broadens the available feedstocks to provide flame retardant in powder formats for five applications in four different sectors: naval, railway, home appliances and wood coatings. Featuring the same fire retardancy performance as chosen toxic benchmarks and enhancing safety and sustainability with an 80% of biobased content, BIOSAFIRE aspires to not only demonstrate its targets on 5 use cases, but also to create a material portfolio and a set of processing guidelines to enhance flame retardants substitution by the industry. This will open the possibility for biobased resins to exhibit good fire retardant properties. It will unlock a market opportunity worth USD 9.5 billion in 2028where Europe involves a 25% share and the sectors involved in the project 65% of the market share. BIOSAFIRE will design an industrial pilot plant to understand and overcome value chain barriers and create a robust techno economic assessment to promote the market uptake of the project results. BIOSAFIRE is an opportunity to test the EU JRC SSbD framework. The project will use a tiered approach to run the framework iteratively and provide a decision support toolset, link SSbD principles to early conceptual design and ultimately provide a software tool based on HEU SUNRISE methodology. The integration of SSH in the project will allow an enhanced social acceptance, further boosted by the training materials developed during the project.