Maintenance, Joining, and Repair innovation in multidomain defence

ongoing

MaJoR is a development project to enable and advance joining, maintenance and repair technologies from Europe's R&T, industry base and SMEs and achieve up to TRL6 through demonstrator activities in three defence domains – air, sea and land. The project addresses the need to expand the EU defence industry's capability and secure European autonomy through cross-border and multi-domain collaboration. Each domain will develop a platform representing the test environment for various technologies developed within MaJoR. For the air domain, a fuselage of a UAV, also known as a Remote Carrier, will be prototyped, the sea domain platform comprises a lightweight, integrated ship mast structure, and lastly, the land platform will be a hybrid truck cabin made of fibre reinforced plastic (FRP). In total, seven technology streams are defined: Bonding and welding system development for composite and multi-materials, Material modelling and simulation/design and sizing method, Integrated structural design incl. integrated functions, Assembly process technology addressing manufacturing scalability, SHM - Inspection and monitoring, Multi-material repairs incl. composites, and Metallic repairs. Furthermore, MaJoR shall empower Europe's SMEs and start-ups with the FSTP programme by providing them financial support (max. €60k per candidate, ≤60 in total) and technical/entrepreneurship mentoring to bring their technologies to the European defence market. MaJoR consortium comprises 35 beneficiaries and one affiliated partner, covering ten member states, and a total grant of €30 million. Through the development and application of the technologies in MaJoR, the project aims to bring down assembly cost by 40%, save 20% weight, increase production speed by 30%, accelerate the design process by 30%, increase 10% more space for systems, reduce the radar cross section (RCS) signature and increase vehicle availability, thereby strengthening the mission-readiness of EU defence.