The AIM-NEXT project arises from the common need of European academy and industry to educate and train the next generation of experts in the field of “Sustainable design of material solutions for engineering applications”. In this regard, the need to Accelerate the design and Insertion of hard Material tools and components, manufactured using non-critical raw materials, for Next generation EXTreme applications has been identified as an area of strategic economic and environmental importance for the European Union, where accordingly the skills developed by the doctoral students are adapted to the current and future industrial needs and the ongoing transformation towards more sustainable production processes. To address this need, a coherent international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral training and research programme has been developed involving a selection of some of the best European Universities in the field together with worldwide leading Industrial organisations covering fundamental elements of the product value chain in key industrial sectors (i.e. mining, manufacturing and construction engineering). By participating in the AIM-NEXT project, the 10 Doctoral Candidates will receive: (i) top level interdisciplinary training through a defined scheme where each fellow is exposed to all three technical environments; (ii) intersectorial training articulated through a wide variety of strategic research themes and the different application areas represented in the consortium; and (iii) international training through a portfolio of mandatory network-wide training events and secondments at academic and industrial partners. Thus, the combination of technical and transferrable skills acquired by the fellows through technical training, interdisciplinary research and industrial exposure will enhance their employability and open up solid career opportunities to them, particularly within a field where skilled PhD engineers are currently an extremely scarce resource.

Driven by the end-users requirements and needs, the main objective of the HIPERDIAS project is to demonstrate high throughput laser-based manufacturing using high-power, high-repetition rate sub-1ps laser. Although the laser system to be developed within HIPERDIAS can address other material processing applications, the focus here will be 3D structuring of silicon at high-speed, precision processing of diamond material and fine cutting of metal for the watch and the medical industry. Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) approach based on highly efficient compressors gratings will be implemented in order to minimize the overall losses of the laser system. The final targets of the project are to demonstrate: - a 10-times increase of ablation rate and productivity of large area 3D-structuring of silicon - a 10 times increase of speed in fine cutting metals - an increase of process speed (6-10 times) at a low processing tools cost of diamond machining Therefore, the laser parameters, as well as the beam shaping, beam guiding (based on Kagomé fibers) and machine systems will be developed and optimized to fulfill the above manufacturing targets. The laser architecture will be based on fully passive amplifier stages combining hybrid (fiber-bulk) amplifier and thin-disk multipass amplifiers to achieve sub-500fs at an average output power of 500W and sub-1ps at an average output of 1kW, at a repetition rate of 1-2 MHz. Furthermore, second harmonic generation (SHG, 515 nm) and third harmonic generation (THG, 343 nm) will be implemented to allow processing investigation at these wavelengths. At 515 nm (respectively 343 nm) an average power of >=250W (respectively >=100W) shall be demonstrated.