UK Department Of Trade And Industry - European Funding Seminar.

On Friday 22 nd June the Department of Trade and In du try in the UK held a one day seminar at the Techno Centre in oventry, England entitled "European Community Framework Five Growth Programme Research Opportunities for Land and Marine Transport" in uppert of the fifth and final periodic call for proposals. Christ s Tokamani of Eur pean Community unit H.2 opened the agenda with a presentation on Key Action 3 (KA3). KA3 ha a mis ion to "encourage, whilst preserving the environment and improving afety, the development and integration of knowledge and technologie into vehicles pecific to land tran p rt and ea-activities". This, it was stated, would enable the ommunity to develop technologie which maintain and consolidate th competitive po ition of the European automotive and rail indu trie and fully expl it the ea' potential and improve the competitivenes f marine indu try. The KA3 key deliverable were tated a I) Improved fuel efficiency and reduced emissions, 2) Improved performance and 3) Improved system competitiveness. Expected outputs were given as: (/) For sustainable future product development Improvements from 30 50% in safety, reliability, maintainability, availability and operability for new and advanced vehicles, vessels and infrastructures. For railways; a 25% increase of reliability, increased availability (99% at peak periods), 30% reduction in life cycle co ts and maintenance costs. For hips, sub-sea vehicles and marine infrastructures; design improvements reducing time to market by 15 20% and increasing efficiency and reducing operating costs by 30 40%. For inter-modal logistics interfaces; increased reliability, energy efficiencies and adaptbility, peeding up logi tics operations by up to 50%. (/) For Environmental sustainability By 2008/2012 time period (against the 1995 SOA baseline for consumption) the targets are; a reduction of 30% in CO emissions for new car fleet average, a reduction of20% in to emissions for rail vehicle and a reduction of 15% in CO 2emissions for marine vessels. In addition; the develo~ment and validation of zero-emission vehicles and equivalent zeroemission vehicles capable ofmarket deployment by 2005/ 2010 and pas by noi e targets of 70dBA for automobiles, 74 dBA for heavy vehicle and a reduction of 10 dBA for rail in relation to current technology. (/) For Improved system manufacturing competiveness 50% reduction of time to market and development costs, improvements through full co-operation between manufacturer, component upplier and sub-contractors and -50% improvements in vehicle quality and reliability.