On 4th of September 2025, MAGELLAN was presented in the EARPA Projects Unveiled webinar, an event that brought together European automotive R&D actors to showcase ongoing Horizon Europe projects. The session was moderated by EARPA’s David Twomey and highlighted three key initiatives: MAGELLAN, LeMesurier and FleXcrash.
The webinar served as a platform to share project progress, exchange technical insights, and emphasise the role of EARPA members in advancing sustainable and innovative automotive technologies. Each project addressed challenges relevant to road mobility, ranging from performance metrics in clean transport programmes, to resilient supply chains for critical raw materials, to lightweight crash-resistant vehicle structures.
Wissam Dib, Business and Partnership Development Manager at IFP Energies Nouvelles, presented the MAGELLAN project. He highlighted the urgent need to establish a resilient and circular European permanent magnet supply chain to reduce dependence on imports of rare earths. He outlined MAGELLAN’s objectives across the make, use, recover pillars of the circular economy: optimising magnet design and material efficiency, enabling large-scale recycling, and demonstrating advanced electric motors using recycled magnets. Wissam also shared concrete progress after 18 months of work, including successful recovery of magnets from end-of-life products, pilot production of new alloys, first tests on substitution of critical elements like neodymium, and the development of digital twin models to support next-generation EV traction motor design.
Other presentations included Simon Edwards (Ricardo) on the LeMesurier project, which develops methods to assess and quantify the KPIs of the 2ZERO partnership, and Sergi Parareda (Eurecat) on FleXcrash, which focuses on innovative aluminium structures and additive manufacturing solutions to improve vehicle crash safety while reducing weight. Both talks underlined the importance of robust methodologies, advanced materials, and collaborative research in driving Europe’s green and digital transitions.
In conclusion, the webinar attracted over 50 participants and provided an excellent opportunity to communicate MAGELLAN’s progress to EARPA members, industry stakeholders, and the scientific community. The presence of a representative from DG RTD reinforced the relevance of MAGELLAN’s results for European research and policy. The event once again confirmed that MAGELLAN is on track to deliver impactful solutions for a sustainable permanent magnet supply chain in Europe.
Missed it? Click below and check out the webinar recording:
