The pharma and food logistics sectors lose sector lose €31.2bn and €27.6bn a year respectively through poor temperature control in the while in transport. Excessive heat or cold during transit can degrade pharmaceuticals or render them useless, and make highly perishable foods inedible or potentially hazardous for consumers. Logistics companies invest €33bn each year in IoT technologies for temperature monitoring. But current solutions still use costly and cumbersome data logging technologies, with limited or no data analytics capacity, low automation and irregular RFID communication. Svalinn is a automatic temperature logger for land, sea and air logistics. It gives a full temperature and geolocation log on each package or shipment from the start to the end of the transit, with programmable intervals and temperature alert thresholds.

Despite more than 200 years of development of batteries, the physical limits of battery performance are far from being reached. The complexity of physio-chemical processes inside batteries render any development strongly dependent on a proper description and monitoring of the inherent evolution and interaction of all materials involved in the functioning of an electrochemical cell. It can be said that rarely any progress in a technology where all basic processes are understood did depend so much on characterization than electrochemical energy storage systems. The mean figures of merit (specific energy per mass, volume or cost unit, cyclability) can all theoretically be substantially improved, under the condition of a proper understanding of where and how their limits are reached in today’s industrialized systems. This underlines how much this important branch of our technological future depends on novel and accessible characterization techniques. Given this grand challenge, access to advanced characterisation solutions for the EU industry will be key to accelerate innovation and reduce the large cost share of materials. However, several bottlenecks are preventing access by companies to novel techniques, to which TEESMAT brings a comprehensive response by leveraging European strengths from 11 Countries and facilitating access to physical facilities, capabilities and services implementing novel characterisation solutions with unprecendenteed capability & performance. Instrumental to this is the launch of a sustainable Open Innovation Test Bed in which qualified public/private partners will demonstrate high-value services for materials advanced characterisation on industrial cases in the value chain of electrochemical energy storage systems. A strong EU community will be built up to propel the continuity of the initiative beyond TEESMAT with a viable, business driven and lean model of operation to create a market for advanced characterisation services, ultimately.