Approval of the project OCTAGON, which aims to accelerate the development of innovative composite materials for aerospace applications

🎉 Great news for composite materials research at iMMC – UCLouvain!

We are delighted to announce the approval of the European project OCTAGON (HORIZON-MSCA-2025-DN), which aims to accelerate the development of innovative composite materials for aerospace applications.

Coordinated by IMDEA Materials Institute, the project will train 12 PhD candidates to investigate the scientific mechanisms governing the behaviour of carbon-fibre reinforced composites during manufacturing and environmental exposure.

Reducing Product Development Lead Time (PDLT) is essential to meet the EU’s ambitious CO₂ and NOx emission targets. Yet progress is limited by two related challenges: long characterization times under hot and humid conditions, and the limited ability to predict Process-Induced Deformations (PIDs).

Although these issues appear distinct, both stem from the lack of fast, reproducible experimental methods and predictive models that can capture the coupled effects of moisture, curing, temperature, and stress across multiple scales.

OCTAGON will address these bottlenecks through a unified scientific strategy. It will develop miniaturized, rapid, and standardized experimental methods to quantify moisture uptake, cure evolution, and residual stress development in small material volumes, thereby reducing testing time and generating high-quality datasets for modelling. UCLouvain will focus on micro and nanomechanical methods as well as on integrating original MEMS-based sensors to extract data at local scales. These data will inform advanced multiscale models that link microscopic behaviors with macroscopic structural responses, providing a robust scientific basis for understanding environmental effects and PIDs. Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a central role in this approach. By integrating physics-informed AI and uncertainty quantification with an Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) framework- connecting materials, processes and structural performance - OCTAGON will create surrogates that learn from experiments and high-fidelity simulations, enabling fast, accurate and uncertainty-aware predictions under manufacturing and service conditions.

Through a multidisciplinary training programme, OCTAGON will prepare researchers capable of advancing the scientific foundations needed to accelerate the reliable introduction of innovative composite materials into engineering applications.

For more information: Website

Funding: HORIZON-MSCA-2025-DN

Beneficiaries: IMDEA Materials (coordinator), CENAERO, KIT, DLR, UCLouvain (Prof. Thomas Pardoen, IMAP), UPORTO, NU, RISE

Associated partners: AIRBUS, HEXCEL, MSC, LIU, UC3M