Graphene Flagship: Europe's $1 billion graphene initiative - Page 7

Researchers from the Graphene Flagship have developed hybrids of graphene and molybdenum disulphide quantum dots to stabilize perovskite solar cells (PSCs). PSCs are a novel type of solar cells which are efficient, relatively easy to produce, made with cheaper materials and, due to their flexibility, can be used in locations where traditional silicon solar cells cannot be placed.

A collaboration between the Graphene Flagship Partners Istituto Italiano di Technologia, University of Rome Tor Vergata, and BeDimensional resulted in a novel approach based on graphene and related materials to stabilize PSCs, thus addressing the stability issue of PSCs, a major hurdle hindering their commercialization.

The EU Graphene Flagship has published its graphene application roadmap, showing when the flagship expects different graphene applications to mature and enter the market.

As can be seen in the roadmap above (click here for a larger image), the first applications that are being commercialized now are applications such as composite functional coatings, graphene batteries, low-cost printable electronics (based on graphene inks), photodetectors and biosensors.

The MWC 2019 is the world's largest event for the mobile industry, organized by the GSMA. It features a large exhibition, conference programme and networking opportunities. The Graphene Flagship partners with the MWC event and will host a graphene pavilion in the exhibition to showcase graphene materials and developers.

This year, one of the exhibitors in the Graphene Pavilion will be ICFO, showcasing prototypes like health monitoring wearables, next-generation tiny spectrometers and camera sensors.

Graphene Flagship researchers at DTU, Denmark, solved the problem of graphene's accumulation of defects and impurities due to environmental exposure by protecting it with insulating layers of hexagonal boron nitride, another two-dimensional material with insulating properties.

Peter Bøggild, researcher at Graphene Flagship partner DTU and coauthor of the paper, explains that although 'graphene is a fantastic material that could play a crucial role in making new nano-sized electronics, it is still extremely difficult to control its electrical properties.' Since 2010, scientists at DTU have tried to tailor the electrical properties of graphene, by making a very fine pattern of holes, so that channels through which an electric power can flow freely are formed. 'Creating nanostructured graphene turned out to be amazingly difficult, since even small errors wash out all the properties we designed it to have,' comments Bøggild.

Graphene Flagship researchers produced graphene-based spintronics devices that utilize both electron charge and spin at room temperature. Demonstrating the spin’s feasibility for bridging distances of up to several micrometres, these results may open the door to new possibilities for integrating information-processing and storage in a single chip.

The Graphene Flagship program recognizes the potential of spintronics devices made from graphene-related materials. Researchers from different universities successfully showed that it is possible to manipulate graphene’s spin properties in a controlled manner at room temperature. These results inspire new directions in the development of spin-logic devices and quantum computing. With miniaturization a major driving force behind the electronics industry, graphene opens new possibilities for compacting spin-logic operations with magnetic memory elements in a single platform, notes Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) Research Professor Stephan Roche, who has been leading the Graphene Flagships Spintronics Work Package since its inception.

Researchers affiliated with the Graphene Flagship have demonstrated novel high-speed graphene-based data communication at a data rate of 50 Gb/s. Integrating graphene sheets into silicon photonics could form the basis for next-generation data communications.

The project was a collaboration between Flagship partners AMO GmbH (Germany), the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT) (Italy), Ericsson (Sweden), Ghent University (Belgium), the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) (Spain), imec (Belgium), Nokia (Germany and Italy), the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) (Austria) and the University of Cambridge (UK).

Researchers from ICN2, IMB-CNM, CSIC, IDIBAPS, and ICFO have designed a graphene-based implant able to record electrical activity in the brain at extremely low frequencies and over large areas.

The team explains that electrode arrays currently used to record the brain’s electrical activity are only able to detect activity over a certain frequency threshold. The new graphene-based technology presented in this work overcomes this technical limitation, allowing access to information found below 0.1 Hz, while at the same time paving the way for future brain-computer interfaces.

Graphene Flagship partners Aernnova, Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria and Airbus have produced a leading edge for the Airbus A350 horizontal tail plane using graphene-enhanced composites. As the first part of the tail plane to contact air, the leading edge is subjected to extreme temperatures caused by compressive heating of the air ahead of the wing. Thus, it must possess excellent mechanical and thermal properties.

Aernnova supplied the resin to Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria who added graphene directly to the resin and applied milling forces, said Ana Reguero of Aernnova. This creates small graphene particles an important step to get good graphene infiltration within the resin, avoiding unwanted impurities, such as solvents, which can alter the viscosity of the resin. It is important to maintain the correct viscosity of the resin to ensure the optimal outcome during the resin transfer molding of the leading edge.

Graphene Flagship partners Thales and M-SOLV have developed a large-scale spray coating tool, reportedly capable of meeting the high volume manufacturing requirements for high power graphene supercapacitors to be used in aerospace applications.

Thales has been working on incorporating graphene into supercapacitors since the start of the Graphene Flagship and has been able to significantly increase the storage potential of supercapacitor devices. "Using graphene, we have been able to increase the power of supercapacitors by five times. We deposited our supercapacitors using spray coating, enabling us to use a variety of substrates, thus allowing us to develop flexible, high power supercapacitors," said Dr. Paolo Bondavalli, Thales Research and Technology.

Bedimensional has received €18 million to promote their main goal – discover new applications of graphene and related materials in consumer products. The investment was made by Italian 'Pellan Group,' specialized in groundbreaking technical materials.

Bedimensional is an Associated Member of the Graphene Flagship, and is part of a network of companies associated to the Graphene Flagship developing new solutions in the field of composites for energy harvest and storage, such as batteries, super capacitors and solar cells, as well as foster the development of new composite materials, some of which are already available on the market.