SIEMENS

Multidisciplinary research is at least as old as the Royal Society, the fellowship of scholars and scientists that was founded 350 years ago. Although the society was British through and through, it always sought to establish networks with the best scientific minds in Europe. Today, the European Union’s Framework Research Programs (FRP) seek to focus Europe-wide research expertise. The seventh program, which is currently under way, has received more than €50 billion in funding.

“Any firm that wants to play a leading role in Europe’s research landscape has to get together with other companies if it’s going to stand up to powerful American and Asian competitors,” says Dr. Ina Sebastian, who is responsible for EU Project Issues at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT). Part of Sebastian’s job is to guide CT through the jungle of available funding opportunities. CT is currently involved in almost 50 EU-funded projects. All in all, about 20 percent of its research activities are conducted within the framework of publicly funded partnerships. “The networks and knowledge generated by such EU projects are more valuable than an injection of capital,” Sebastian claims.

Internet of Things. One such project is the “Internet of Things at Work” (IoT@Work), in which scientists under the direction of Siemens CT study the Internet of the future, which will link machines rather than people. “Our goal is to make communication between industrial machines and Internet technologies more intelligent,” says Project Manager Dr. Amine Houyou. The aim is to make the commissioning and replacement of defective components as simple and fast as exchanging USB sticks in a PC. Assembly lines in the auto industry could then be retrofitted more rapidly, and production networks could respond autonomously to defects and reconfigurations.

This would make production more flexible and allow manufacturers to produce variable small lots for different customers instead of having to rely solely on mass production. At the same time, the Internet of things will help to prepare factories for extreme events in the future. “IT security wasn’t really an issue in the early days of the Internet,” says Houyou. “But in our project, security solutions are developed in parallel at every step, leading to an overall concept in the end.” For one thing, industrial facilities will be made more secure against hacker and virus attacks.

The European Commission selected only one tenth of all the applications for the IoT project. Because of its technical excellence, Houyou’s concept was among those chosen.

With her Siemens colleagues in mind, Sebastian searches for suitable projects such as IoT, forwards the information to them, and assists them with their applications. The latter can be as long as 80 pages and must include not only objectives, work package descriptions, and process phases, but also a list of possible partners. After a unit has been approved for a project, coalition negotiations are immediately initiated. Each partner is granted rights of use for the results, and patent distribution issues are negotiated in detail.

If negotiations have not concluded after six weeks, the EU can rescind a project’s application. Houyou’s team includes security experts from the European Microsoft Innovation Center and staff from City University London, as well as Italian consulting firm TXT. Also on board are software architecture specialists, Centro Ricerche Fiat (which is demonstrating some of the project results at its facilities), and Institut Industrial IT in Lemgo, which is responsible for IoT project automation and communication technologies.

100 Million Degrees Celsius. The EU is also funding projects that address new methods of generating energy, including nuclear fusion (see Pictures of the Future, Spring 2010, Here Comes the Sun). For decades, Scientists have been trying to harness and profitably exploit this virtually inexhaustible and CO2-free energy source. But getting atoms in a fusion reactor to form a plasma requires temperatures as high as 100 million degrees Celsius. Although the temperature drops to a maximum of 2,000 degrees at the reactor walls, it’s still too hot for most materials. A European research and industrial consortium under the direction of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics has now developed new high-performance materials. Almost 40 partners, research institutes, universities, and materials manufacturers from six countries have participated in this huge project.

Participants held meetings alternately in their home countries, which included France, Greece, and Slovakia, to exchange results. Between meetings, they worked independently, while also discussing issues via e-mail or by phone as necessary and passing along their results through desktop sharing systems. The project’s work packages were precisely distributed among the partners and process phases. Siemens carried out extensive tests to find out how resistant the materials were. The five-year project, which ended in September 2010, led to the creation of new technologies for industrial sectors. Siemens’ Energy Sector, for example, is looking for heat-resistant materials for its turbine blades. That’s because the higher the temperatures the blades can withstand, the greater will be the efficiency of the power plant in which they are installed. High-temperature materials can also be used for power electronics in trains that are exposed to extreme thermomechanical stress loads.

Insufficient R&D? The seventh FRP is the largest funded project of its kind in the world. But with research and development expenditures totaling 2.1 percent of gross domestic product, the EU remains below its own R&D target of three percent. It also trails its U.S. and Japanese competitors in this regard (see article "Emerging Markets Catching Up in Research and Development"). That’s why, if European companies want to keep pace in the global race to develop top technologies, they must constantly enter into new partnerships and be on the lookout for potentially game-changing market trends.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) represent one such fundamental trend. At the heart of every OLED are plastic coatings a hundred times thinner than a human hair. These luminescent plastics are already used in cell phones and flat screens. The monitor market is now dominated by Asian countries. But that doesn’t mean that Europe doesn’t plan to be a major player in the lighting business.

Siemens’ subsidiary Osram introduced its first OLED, the “Orbeos,” at the end of 2009. However, the product is still too expensive for use in general lighting applications. With this in mind, the EU’s project CombOLED (Combined Organic LED Technology) was initiated to help search for new ways to lower manufacturing costs so as to pave the way for the mass production of OLEDs.

A consortium of companies, labs, and universities led by Osram, which also received considerable support from Siemens CT, worked on the project for three years. The result was that a combination of wet coating and high vacuum techniques turned out to be the least expensive method of producing OLEDS. Wet coating enables economical production; high vacuum techniques ensure high-quality brightness, efficiency, and a long lifespan.

Flat and Bright. Another EU project is focused on developing light-emitting electrochemical cells (LEECs) that are thin and flat, like OLEDs. “LEECs’ simple design leads to manufacturing benefits such as the ability to use roll-to-roll processing,” says CT researcher Dr. Wiebke Sarfert. Prototypes are already producing light in Siemens and Osram labs, but the technology is still in its infancy as compared to OLEDs. Researchers are examining basic approaches to creating white light, as well as the use of roll-to-roll wet coating processes for achieving higher throughputs. The project includes partners from all over Europe. Siemens has particularly close ties to, and also exchanges knowledge with, the University of Valencia, which is responsible for the project’s component physics. The university’s students are often invited to Siemens’ labs to familiarize themselves with applied research.

No company can develop such innovations on its own, which makes it all the more important for European nations to pull together to maintain an edge. What’s more, there’s a big plus for participants: they get to know each other.