The fuel cells and hydrogen (FCH) industry has made considerable progress toward market deployment. However existing legal framework and administrative processes (LAPs) – covering areas such as planning, safety, installation and operation – only reflect use of incumbent technologies. The limited awareness of FCH technologies in LAPs, the lack of informed national and local administrations and the uncertainty on the legislation applicable to FCH technologies elicit delays and extra-costs, when they do not deter investors or clients. This project aims at tackling this major barrier to deployment as follows: • Systematically identifying and describing the LAPs applicable to FCH technologies in 18 national legal systems as well as in the EU proper legal system. • Assessing and quantifying LAP impacts in time and/or resource terms and identify those LAP constituting a legal barrier to deployment. • Comparing the 18 countries to identify best and bad practices • Raising awareness in the countries where a LAP creates a barrier to deployment. • Advocating targeted improvements in each of 18 countries + EU level • It will make all this work widely available through: (1) A unique online database allowing easy identification, description and assessment of LAPs by country and FCH application. (2) Policy papers by applications and by country with identification of best practice and recommendations for adapting LAP. (3) A series of national (18) and European (1) workshops with public authorities and investors. HyLAW sets up a National Association Alliance not just for the duration of the project, but for the long term consolidation of the sector under a single unified umbrella. By bringing together these national associations and all of Hydrogen Europe’s members, it’s the first time ever that the entire European FCH sector is brought together with a clear and common ambition.

This proposal addresses the vital issue of prediction of multiphase flows in large diameter risers in off-shore hydrocarbon recovery. The riser is essentially a vertical or near-vertical pipe connecting the sea-bed collection pipe network (the flowlines) to a sea-surface installation, typically a floating receiving and processing vessel. In the early years of oil and gas exploration and production, the oil and gas companies selected the largest and most accessible off-shore fields to develop first. In these systems, the risers were relatively short and had modest diameters. However, as these fields are being depleted, the oil and gas companies are being forced to look further afield for replacement reserves capable of being developed economically. This, then, has led to increased interest in deeper waters, and harsher and more remote environments, most notably in the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazilian Campos basin, West of Shetlands and the Angolan Aptian basin. Many of the major deepwater developments are located in water depths exceeding 1km (e.g. Elf's Girassol at 1300m or Petrobras' Roncador at 1500-2000m). To transport the produced fluids in such systems with the available pressure driving forces has led naturally to the specification of risers of much greater diameter (typically 300 mm) than those used previously (typically 75 mm). Investments in such systems have been, and will continue to be, huge (around $35 billion up to 2005) with the riser systems accounting for around 20% of the costs. Prediction of the performance of the multiphase flow riser systems is of vital importance but, very unfortunately, available methods for such prediction are of doubtful validity. The main reason for this is that the available data and methods have been based on measurements on smaller diameter tubes (typically 25-75 mm) and on the interpretation of these measurements in terms of the flow patterns occurring in such tubes. These flow patterns are typically bubble, slug, churn and annular flows. The limited amount of data available shows that the flow patterns in larger tubes may be quite different and that, within a given flow pattern, the detailed phenomena may also be different. For instance, there are reasons to believe that slug flow of the normal type (with liquid slugs separated by Taylor bubbles of classical shape) may not exist in large pipes. Methods to predict such flows with confidence will be improved significantly by means of an integrated programme of work at three universities (Nottingham, Cranfield and Imperial College) which will involve both larger scale investigations as well as investigations into specific phenomena at a more intimate scale together with modelling studies. Large facilities at Nottingham and Cranfield will be used for experiments in which the phase distribution about the pipe cross section will be measured using novel instrumentation which can handle a range of fluids. The Cranfield tests will be at a very large diameter (250 mm) but will be confined to vertical, air/water studies with special emphasis on large bubbles behaviour. In contrast those at Nottingham will employ a slightly smaller pipe diameter (125 mm) but will use newly built facilities in which a variety of fluids can be employed to vary physical properties systematically and can utilise vertical and slightly inclined test pipes. The work to be carried out at Imperial College will be experimental and numerical. The former will focus on examining the spatio-temporal evolution of waves in churn and annular flows in annulus geometries; the latter will use interface-tracking methods to perform simulations of bubbles in two-phase flow and will also focus on the development of a computer code capable of predicting reliably the flow behaviour in large diameter pipes. This code will use as input the information distilled from the other work-packages regarding the various flow regimes along the pipe.

The European maritime transport policy as well as national governments recognizes the importance of the waterborne transport systems as key elements for general and sustainable growth in Europe. In line with the EU Transport White Paper 30% of road freight over 300 km should shift to other modes such as rail or waterborne transport by 2030, and more than 50 % by 2050. So far, this ambition has failed spectacularly. In the period 1995 to 2016 total freight increased with approximately 30%. The share of road transport in intra-EU ton-km increased, whereas the share of short sea shipping (SSS) dropped. Inland had a slight decrease. Waterborne transport has a great potential to reduce road congestion as well as pollution from the transport sector. When used correctly, it is very energy efficient and new ship types can operate with a combination of electric batteries, fuel cells and, when necessary, highly efficient combustion engines, e.g. powered by LNG. The main objective of AEGIS is to develop a new waterborne transport system for Europe that leverages the benefits of ships and barges while overcoming the conventional problems like dependence on terminals, high transhipment costs, low speed and frequency and low automation in information processing. AEGIS intends to use new innovations from the area of connected and automated transport, including smaller and more flexible vessel types, automated cargo handling, autonomous ships, new cargo units and new digital technologies to regain the position that waterborne traditionally had in cargo transport. Ships are most efficient when the cargo holds are full. AEGIS will look for ways to attract new cargo, inbound as outbound, to waterborne transport. This requires new types of services, new business models and better logistics systems.

Supercomputers have been extensively used to solve complex scientific and engineering problems, boosting the capability to design more efficient systems. The pace at which data are generated by scientific experiments and large simulations (e.g., multiphysics, climate, weather forecast, etc.) poses new challenges in terms of capability of efficiently and effectively analysing massive data sets. Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) recently gained momentum for boosting simulations’ speed. ML/DL techniques are part of simulation processes, used to early detect patterns of interests from less accurate simulation results. To address these challenges, the ACROSS project will co-design and develop an HPC, BD, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) convergent platform, supporting applications in the Aeronautics, Climate and Weather, and Energy domains. To this end, ACROSS will leverage on next generation of pre-exascale infrastructures, still being ready for exascale systems, and on effective mechanisms to easily describe and manage complex workflows in these three domains. Energy efficiency will be achieved by massive use of specialized hardware accelerators, monitoring running systems and applying smart mechanisms of scheduling jobs. ACROSS will combine traditional HPC techniques with AI (specifically ML/DL) and BD analytic techniques to enhance the application test case outcomes (e.g., improve the existing operational system for global numerical weather prediction, climate simulations, develop an environment for user-defined in-situ data processing, improve and innovate the existing turbine aero design system, speed up the design process, etc.). The performance of ML/DL will be accelerated by using dedicated hardware devices. ACROSS will promote cooperation with other EU initiatives (e.g., BDVA, EPI) and future EuroHPC projects to foster the adoption of exascale-level computing among test case domain stakeholders.