As CONNECT-NM advances towards strengthening European research and innovation in nuclear materials, the partnership’s core work is structured along the following eight distinct Work Packages:
Work Package 1 (WP1): Coordination and Daily Management
The main objective of CONNECT-NM’s first work package is to ensure the Partnership’s proficient management, ensuring both an efficient administrative environment and effective governance system. The launching and monitoring of open calls within the partnership also falls into the responsibilities of this work stream. Further key WP1 tasks include the revision of the strategic research agenda in the field, as well as the consideration of aspects of gender dimension and attention to ethics requirements.
Work Package 2 (WP2): Education, Training, Mobility and Access to Infrastructures
This work package is primarily dedicated to the organisation and monitoring of education, training and mobility activities within the partnership, as well as to establish and maintain a framework for providing access for participants to scientific infrastructures in the field.
Work Package 3 (WP3): Communication, Dissemination and Result Exploitation
The overall aim of the third work package focuses on both increasing the visibility and supporting the impact of the CONNECT NM Partnership. Building on this, the core sub-objectives of this work package include:
- Effectively communicating the ongoing work and results of the project to key stakeholders, encompassing industry, research, academia, and policy networks.
- Promoting the dissemination of the project findings through the CONNECT-NM website, scientific publications, and presentations at webinars, workshops and conferences.
- Fostering advice and services aimed at enhancing the impact and exploitation potential of projects funded by CONNECT-NM, notably under the guidance of experts in innovation and results exploitation from industrial and entrepreneurial fields.
Work Package 4 (WP4): Nuclear materials knowledge and data management
This work package seeks to coordinate the activities of CONNECT-NM for the development of a data management methodology, to be adopted by all the research lines to allow for the establishment of a Nuclear Materials Knowledge Organisation System (NM-KOS).
Work Package 5 (WP5): Advanced materials development and manufacturing
The partnership’s fifth work package aims to:
- Pave the way for the creation of a potential nuclear material acceleration platform (MAP) in Europe, fostering more efficient methodologies which would enable the process of materials discovery and development to become significantly faster and more sustainable.
- Develop innovative materials solutions to improve the design of structural components, core components, advanced fuel elements or concrete structures in current or future nuclear reactor technologies.
- Explore and extend practical applications of advanced manufacturing processes.
Work Package 6 (WP6): Materials and component qualification – testing, standardisation and design rules
The central objective of this work-package revolves around identifying methods to accelerate material qualification. This includes both evaluating, developing and implementing Accelerated Qualification Paths (AQPs), as well as integrating, coordinating and operating test facilities under joint ‘Test-Beds’ (TBs) to carry out the qualification in a realistic time-frame.
Work Package 7 (WP7): Non-destructive examination and materials health monitoring
CONNECT-NM’s seventh work package primarily aims to develop intelligent materials health monitoring systems to predict material properties over the whole component lifecycle. Importantly, the work of this project section will help to:
- Improve knowledge about how nuclear materials behave at high temperature and in conditions of strong degradation.
- Develop and improve methodologies for predicting materials behaviour, set to be applicable under an increasingly wide range of operational conditions.
- Boost sustainability aspects, providing tools that allow for reduced test cycles and requirements, subsequently limiting radioactive waste.
Work Package 8 (WP8): Advanced materials modelling and characterisation
The main objective of the final work package of the partnership is centred on the development and improvement of advanced predictive methodologies for nuclear materials behaviour in the areas of structural metals of the primary and secondary circuits, ceramic fuel materials and concrete materials of containments and biological shields. Its ultimate ambition also relates to increasing sustainability, primarily through improved modelling and characterisation methods.
