AIRTIFICIAL AEROSPACE & DEFENSE SAU

Their core work

Airtificial Aerospace & Defense is a Spanish industrial company working at the intersection of advanced composite materials and intelligent sensing systems for aerospace applications. Their core technical contribution spans from embedding autonomous structural health monitoring into composite structures to integrating photonic sensing directly into composite manufacturing tools. In HARVEST, they worked on composites that harvest thermoelectric energy to power their own damage-detection systems. In SEER, they moved toward making the manufacturing tooling itself "smart" — embedding silicon photonic circuits to monitor curing and defect formation in real time. Across both projects, their practical role is applying sensing and materials science to make aerospace composites both more reliable and more intelligently manufactured.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their first project (HARVEST, 2018), the focus was squarely on the material itself — composites that could generate thermoelectric energy and use it to run autonomous structural health monitoring, sensing strain, UV exposure, and damage without external power. By their second project (SEER, 2020), the emphasis shifted from the structure to the manufacturing process: how do you make composite parts better by instrumenting the tooling with photonic sensors that watch the curing process in real time. The trajectory moves from "smart structures that monitor themselves in service" toward "smart factories that produce better structures from the start" — a natural and coherent progression toward Industry 4.0 in aerospace manufacturing.

They are moving from in-service structural monitoring toward embedding intelligence directly into the manufacturing process, positioning for the digitised aerospace production floor rather than the aircraft aftermarket.

How they like to work

Airtificial A&D has participated exclusively as a consortium partner across both projects — they have never led a project as coordinator. With 20 unique partners across 9 countries over just two projects, they work in moderately large, diverse consortia rather than tight bilateral arrangements. This pattern suggests they enter consortia as a domain-specific industrial contributor — an aerospace end-user or technology integrator who validates research in a real-world manufacturing context — rather than as a research driver or project manager.

Their two projects brought them into contact with 20 unique partners spread across 9 countries, a notably broad network for such a small H2020 footprint. No single geographic cluster dominates, suggesting they join consortia assembled by others rather than anchoring their own regional network.

What sets them apart

Airtificial A&D occupies an unusual space: an industrial aerospace company (not a university or research institute) that brings genuine hands-on composite manufacturing and sensing integration experience to research consortia. Where most industrial partners in aerospace H2020 projects are large primes like Airbus or Leonardo, this company operates at a tighter, more specialised scale — making them accessible as a partner for mid-sized consortia that need aerospace manufacturing credibility without the governance complexity of a major prime. Their dual competence in both structural composites and photonic sensing integration is genuinely rare and hard to find in a single non-academic partner.

Highlights from their portfolio

• HARVEST
  The most ambitious technically — combining thermoelectric energy harvesting, multi-scale composite design, and autonomous structural health monitoring in a single system, with the highest EC contribution to this organisation (€317,278).
• SEER
  Marks a clear strategic pivot toward digitised manufacturing: embedding silicon photonic circuits into composite tooling to monitor curing in real time, directly connecting aerospace composites with Industry 4.0 methods.