The FlexRICAN project brings together three landmark ESFRI infrastructures that have, or will have, when in operation different usages of energy: the European Spallation Source ERIC (ESS) in Sweden, the Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC (ELI), with two running facilities (Czech Republic and Hungary) and the European Magnetic Field Laboratory AISBL (EMFL), with facilities in Grenoble and Nijmegen for DC fields and Dresden and Toulouse for pulsed fields (CNRS, SRU, HZDR). The RIs and partners involved in FlexRICAN will unite their strength to optimize their ongoing (and/or future) energy projects. They will demonstrate that the RIs, as electro-intensive actors, are at the good scale to develop a global energetic approach delivering services to the European electrical grid through optimized energy flexibility and to local heating networks by developing Waste Heat Recovery projects. Developing renewable energy capacity production and managing these developments in an integrated way thanks to energy oriented modelization integrating RIs user communities and the new stakeholders appears like a promising solution. Through the development of a multi-energy approach integrating academic knowledge and two key actors of the energy sector, Alfa Laval (AL) and Energy Pool (EP), FlexRICAN will propose new technologies and solutions to increase resource use efficiency and reduce environmental impacts of European Research Infrastructures (RIs). The project will focus on assessing and validating the implementation of new solutions and technologies at the three ESFRI infrastructures involved. Prototypes and solutions will be developed and tested to identify solutions at the real scale of the infrastructures. It will contribute to quantify energy services and carbon print gain the RIs can performed throughout their full life cycle in order to increase the long-term sustainability of European Research Infrastructures and to contribute to the resilience of the energetical European system.

The magnetic field is a powerful thermodynamic parameter to influence the state of any material system and such is an outstanding experimental tool for physics. To go beyond the conventional commercially available superconducting (SC) magnets, very large infrastructures such as the ones gathered within the European Magnetic Field Laboratory (EMLFL) are necessary. EMFL provides access to static resistive magnets (up to 38 T) and pulsed non-destructive (up to 100 T) and semi-destructive (up to 200 T) magnets for all qualified European researchers. Some recent advances open the way for the implementation of high temperature superconductor (HTS) magnets at the EMFL facilities. The SuperEMFL design study aims to add through the development of the HTS technology an entirely new dimension to the EMFL that go beyond the commercial offer, providing the European high field user community with much higher SC fields and novel SC magnet geometries, like large-bore-high-flux magnets or radial access magnets. The development of SC magnets that can partly replace current high-field resistive magnets will result in a significant reduction of the energy consumption of the static field EMFL facilities. This will strongly improve EMFL’s financial and ecological sustainability and at the same time boost its scientific performance and impact. The high field values, the very low noise and vibration levels, and the possibility to run very long duration experiments will make high SC magnetic fields attractive to scientific communities that so far have rarely used the EMFL facilities (NMR, scanning probe, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies, ultra-low temperature physics, electro-chemistry …). All these new research possibilities will strengthen the scientific performance, efficiency and attractiveness of the EMFL and thereby of the European Research Area (ERA). The implementation of this strategy should therefore be considered as a major upgrade of the EMFL.

One of the great challenges of society is innovation through the development of new and advanced materials. Such tailored materials are needed in all key-technological areas, from renewable energy concepts, through next-generation data storage to biocompatible materials for medical applications and many of these future materials will be synthesized on a nano-scale. In order to reach these goals, state-of-the-art analytical tools are needed. High magnetic fields are one of the most powerful tools available to scientists for the study, modification and control of states of matter, and in order to compete on the global scale, Europe needs state-of-the-art high magnetic field facilities which provide the highest possible fields (both continuous and pulsed) for its many active and world-leading researchers. The European Magnetic Field Laboratory (EMFL) is a legal entity in the form of an AISBL under Belgian law. Its current members are CNRS, HZDR and RU as facility operators and the University of Nottingham, the latter on behalf of the UK user community, funded through an EPSRC Mid-scale Facility Grant. It represents all high-field infrastructures in Europe and constitutes a distributed research infrastructure of global impact and importance, which was added to the ESRFI Landmark list in 2016. The ISABEL project aims to strengthen the long-term sustainability of the EMFL through the realization of three objectives : - strengthening the EMFL structure by enlarging its membership and by improving several organisational aspects, such as data management, outreach and access procedures. - strengthening the socio-economic impact of the EMFL, by bridging the gap with industry. - strengthening of the role of high magnetic field research in Europe.