The main research objectives of the Energy and Materials Demand and Efficiency (EME) cluster are:

• to assess the current energy and material use and the related environmental impacts on the level of products, processes, sectors and economies;

• to quantify the short-term and long-term potentials for improving energy and material efficiency;

• to study the mechanisms leading to the development of new energy and material efficient technologies and to analyse how the process of development can be accelerated;

• to determine the main obstacles to development and implementation of energy and material efficient technologies (e.g. costs and organisational obstacles) and to study counter-acting societal trends in energy and material consumption (economic growth and consumer patterns);

• to analyse the effectiveness and efficiency of policies and measures to improve energy and material efficiency (e.g. benchmarking, agreements and certificates), and to derive handling options for the actors concerned (governments, industries, consumers).

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In Work Package 12 Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) will be applied to nanostructured polymers and polymer-based nanocomposites. The LCE-work will cover (environmental) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as well as Life Cycle Costing (LCC)

1. Dr. Evert Nieuwlaar
2. Dr. Martin Patel