Light Structures Reports First Call European Defense Fund Success
Maritime structural health monitoring specialist Light Structures is a member of two winning consortia in the first call of the European Defense Fund (EDF). Both consortia consist of the leading naval yards in Europe, organized through The Shipyards’ & Maritime Equipment Association of Europe (Sea Europe), national delegates, and the Norwegian partners SINTEF, Kongsberg, Jotne and Light Structures.
The EDF was established to support high-end defense capability projects such as the next generation of aircraft fighters, tanks and ships, as well as critical defense technologies such as military cloud, AI, semiconductors, space, cyber or medical counter- measures. Following the first ever EDF request for proposals, 61 collaborative defense research and development projects with a total EU support of almost €1.2 billion have been selected for funding.
The dTHOR consortium, lead by SINTEF (Norway), has been awarded €14.5 Million for research on the advancement of interpreting results from Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems in a Navy context (EDF-2021-NAVAL-R-SSHM). dTHOR (Digital Ship Structural Health Monitoring), will develop the next generation of predictive systems based on advanced sensors, a digital framework complying with recognized open standards for data exchange, and hybrid analysis and modelling combining physics-based, data-driven models.
“dTHOR is an especially relevant project as it is dedicated to developments within our core expertise of Structural Health Monitoring,” comments Geir Sagvolden, CTO, Light Structures. “Our SENSFIBTM sensors and data analysis expertise will be applied to provide the high-quality data expected of a next generation system that can be used to improve vessel and asset safety as well as to reduce the lifetime maintenance costs of naval and commercial ships.”
Light Structures is also a member of the EDINAF consortium, lead by Navantia (Spain), which has been awarded €29 Million for research on the next generation Digital Ship and Ship Digital Architecture (call: EDF-2021-NAVAL-R-DSSDA). EDINAF (European Digital Naval Foundation) will provide a European digital ship reference architecture, integrating the systems onboard to enhance operational capabilities.
“The digital focus within EDINAF will help Light Structures to strengthen and expand our on-going program of digitalizing the data that our SENSFIBTM systems acquire,” adds Geir Sagvolden. “The potential for unlocking even deeper insight from SHM is very exciting but it’s essential to move towards a more standardized approach regardless of data source if we are to truly benefit from maritime digitalization, making EDINAF an important initiative for all maritime stakeholders.”