AIM is one of the eight projects funded under the EIC Pathfinder Challenge on Waste-to-Value, which has awarded a combined EU contribution of around 30.5 million Euros. Together, the projects are exploring different ways to turn difficult-to-recycle waste into useful products, from breaking down mixed plastics and recovering materials from desalination brines to treating wastewater and converting CO₂ into chemicals.

Within this portfolio, AIM has a specific role: it is the only project developing digital twins. Using artificial intelligence and computational simulations, the project will create virtual models that link processes at the atomic level with the behaviour of a complete device. These models will provide computational support to the other projects, helping their teams understand how their technologies work and explore how different materials or operating conditions could affect their performance.

Digital twins will allow researchers to test ideas virtually, compare different approaches and identify potential problems before building or scaling up a device. This could reduce the need for costly physical trials and help researchers make better-informed decisions about which solutions to investigate before moving to real-world testing.

This project comes at a time when Europe is pushing to reduce waste, cut emissions, and rely less on fossil resources. On its way to defossilisation, energy systems and industries are developing solutions to replace fossil inputs with alternative carbon-based raw materials, including waste.

However, working with waste is currently challenging as these materials are often contaminated or contain substances that make conventional recycling difficult. Additionally, in these recycling processes many things happen at once and at very different scales: reactions take place at the level of atoms, but at the same time materials change, transport processes occur and the full device operates under complex conditions. Today, these levels of complexity are often studied separately, which makes it hard to connect detailed knowledge with real performance.

“In AIM, we want to understand these systems as a whole, not as separate pieces. By combining artificial intelligence with multiscale simulations, we can connect what happens at the smallest level with the performance of the full device. This will help us design better and more realistic waste-to-value technologies,” says Núria López, project coordinator.

AIM’s goals closely match the research agenda of RC FEMS. The centre brings together researchers from Ruhr University Bochum, TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen to develop materials and systems for a sustainable energy future. A central idea of RC FEMS is that better energy technologies need an understanding that runs from the atomic scale to the working device, combining simulation, data-driven methods and experiment. That is exactly the bridge AIM’s digital twins are meant to build.

“Turning waste into fuels, chemicals and materials depends on how materials behave at the atomic level, and on how that behaviour carries through to the performance of a real device,” says Silvana Botti. “This question is at the core of RC FEMS. With AIM, the simulation methods we develop in Bochum feed directly into a European network of waste-to-value technologies.”