NEWS & TECHNOLOGY NOVEL MATERIALS
Europe spends €92 million on 11 graphene projects
By Peter Clarke
Europe’s ‘Graphene Flagship’ initiative is supplying €45
million for graphene commercialization projects with such
companies as Airbus, Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles, Lufthansa
Technik, Siemens, and
ABB. The partner companies
will spend €47 million.
The €92 million budget is
intended to pay for eleven
new spearhead projects.
Overall Graphene Flagship is
a billion-euro project intended
to last from 2013 to 2023 and
has more than 145 academic
and industrial research groups
in 21 countries.
One of the approved
projects is GRAPES, which
is focussed on the stability of
graphene-based perovskite
solar panels. The project
includes 2D materials startup
BeDimensional SpA (Genoa,
Italy) and is expected to take
efficiency to record levels.
The AUTOVISION project is set to develop vision sensors
for autonomous vehicles and includes Aixtron of the UK and
Veoneer of Sweden. Veoneer is a 2018 spin-off from Autoliv
focused on safety, ADAS and automated driving.
The Metrograph project led by Nokia and including Finisar is
chartered with developing a graphene-based photonic transceiver
to lower power consumption at high frequencies. The
main goal is to develop a
wavelength agnostic, wide
spectrum 200G coherent optical
transceiver, including both
the transmitter and receiver,
based on graphene photonic
chips.
Through a national funding
mechanism that allows collaboration
to extend outside
the European Union Mellanox
Ltd. of California and Israel
will participate in a project
targeting the development of
lidar for self-driving cars and
other applications, enabled by
graphene.
“Each of the eleven new
initiatives will be led by key
Graphene Flagship industrial
partners. This will pave the way towards the commercialisation
of the prototypes when the projects end in 2023,” said Jari
Kinaret, director of Graphene Flagship, in a statement.
Other European flagship initiatives with billion-euro budgets
include the Human Brain Project and the Quantum Flagship.
Electrocaloric heat pumps promise refrigerant-free cooling
SBy Julien Happich ix Fraunhofer institutes are joining forces on a newly
launched project, ElKaWe (for Electrocaloric Heat Pumps)
aiming to develop efficient solid-state and refrigerant-free
electrocaloric heat pumps
over the next four years.
Nowadays, heat pumps
work almost exclusively on the
basis of compressor technology
which requires harmful
refrigerants. On the contrary,
solid-state heat pumps including
electrocaloric systems
work with harmless fluids such
as water. Caloric systems are
also noiseless, which is important
for the air conditioning of
electric vehicles, for example.
When an electric field is applied
to electrocaloric materials,
the electric moments in the field are aligned – the material
heats up. The resulting heat is dissipated via a heat sink so that
the material cools down again to its initial temperature. If the
electric field is removed now, the order of the electric moments
is reduced and the material cools down. At this stage it can absorb
thermal energy from a heat source. The effect is reversible.
In this way, a cycle can be set up that functions as an efficient
heat pump for cooling or heating.
“We are convinced that there is an opportunity to completely
replace compressor-based
heat pumps in the long
term,” explains Prof. Karsten
Buse, Executive director at
Fraunhofer IPM, who is in
charge of the project. “According
to the knowledge we
have gained in this field to
date, electrocalorics can have
disruptive potential for heating
and cooling technology”.
According to the German
Environment Agency, more
than half of the total energy
used throughout Germany is
used for heating and cooling.
Heat pumps that use environmental heat for heating and hot
water preparation in buildings and are operated with electricity
generated from renewable sources are thus an important building
block for heat generation.
They are the missing link between electricity and heat generation,
which is still mainly based on fossil fuels. However, the
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