Stralingfaciliteitsnetwerk voor het onderzoeken van effecten voor industrie en onderzoek (RADNEXT)

New applications in the industrial sectors of space, automotive, IoT, nuclear dismantling and civil applications, medical and accelerators among others require innovative radiation testing methodologies. As well, for coping with the industrial demand and market timelines, streamlined and coordinated testing becomes highly necessary.
Although punctual exceptions exist, Europe does not count with a coordinated network of cost-effective testing facilities helping these purposes. Such a network could enormously help fast innovators such as SMEs who in many cases find difficult to access the required facilities and related test expertise. As well, it will offer a competitive advantage to large Corporations. Novel testing methodologies will also pave the way for generating new standards since the existing ones are mainly restricted to classical space applications and radiation-hardened components.
Pan-European and National Research Infrastructures can play a key role for boosting European Industry by taking the first steps in the creation of a sustainable, coordinated and streamlined irradiation testing facilities network. It will also respond to the need of establishing a radiation hardness evaluation based on risk assessment and mitigation rather than on complete risk avoidance.
This project aims at increasing and optimizing the access of system developers to irradiation facilities in which representative conditions of their final application are reproduced, and that can serve as a satisfactory validation for the end-users.
Such optimization will be based on a network of irradiation facilities with a common entry-point, in which users can define, prepare, carry out and analyze their irradiation campaigns. A key point of such improvement would be that of advancing in the harmonization and
standardization of the system level testing methodology, so not to multiply efforts around the same common objective.