NWO granted the program Data Enhanced Physical models to reduce Materials use (DEPMAT) under the Perspectief call 2020. This 5-years research program will be led by Prof. dr. ir. Ton van den Boogaard of University of Twente and involves 3 technical universities in the Netherlands and 5 industrial partners. M2i will be responsible for the management of this program.
To achieve the Dutch circularity goals, the use of raw materials must be drastically reduced by 2030. This is particularly relevant for steels, in view of the extremely high ecological footprint of their primary production process. Improved circularity can be achieved by increasing the ratio of recycled material (scrap) in the production process. However, by increasing scrap-ratio, impurities are introduced that induce variations in the mechanical properties of the steel, causing problems in the manufacturing of steel products. DEPMAT aims to develop data-enhanced physical material models which are sufficiently predictive to guide adjustments of process settings, to achieve constant output quality with varying impurity content, enabling higher scrap ratios in steel production and processing.