M2i arranges funding to support materials research and innovation. We do this by setting up a consortium of industrial partners to share costs, or by requesting funds from one of the many financing instruments available in The Netherlands and in Europe.
High Tech Materials projects
M2i has established a partnership agreement with Technology Foundation STW to streamline the funding of materials research projects in the Netherlands.
Since the launch of the High Tech Materials program, with bi-annual calls in 2013, M2i has successfully supported its partners in attracting STW funding. The success rate of the projects organised by M2i more than doubles the average success rates in STW programs.
Industrial Partnership Programs (IPP) with FOM Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter
M2i, as a consortium of industrial partners, was first beneficiary of a FOM-IPP in 2008.
The program, entitled “Size-dependent material properties“, looked at the impact of size reduction on the physical, chemical, electrical and mechanical properties of the materials. With the ongoing trend of miniaturization, especially in electronics, it becomes increasingly important to understand of how properties change and how materials behave when the system size is reduced is a requirement to account for, or even exploit, such size-dependent properties during design.
This programme is strongly related to the research efforts conducted in the clusters of the M2i, focusing on fundamental properties and processing of functional materials. The FOM-M2i programme particularly addressed scientific issues, which are too fundamental for direct support from industry, but the answers of which are of great technological interest.
In 2014, a second FOM-IPP started at M2i, with the support of five industrial partners (ProRail, SKF, DAF, Tata Steel and Philips).
The program, titled “Physics of failure”, aims to unravel the physical complexity of the initiation and development of damage and failure in complex and dynamically changing microstructures in metals. Failure, i.e. the deterioration of the functionality of a material or component, determines the environmental and economic effects of the use of materials in technological and consumer products. Besides the societal reasons and urgency, the initiation and development of damage and failure in metallic microstructures pose challenging scientific questions.
The programme combines projects that focus on the microstructural damage mechanisms in metals, projects that focus on the controlling (local) loading conditions and projects that focus on modelling the accompanying physics across the scales. The intensive interaction between the projects enables to develop an in-depth view on the evolution of damage and failure in metallic microstructures, which goes well beyond the state-of-the-art in the field.