Can you believe that our GRAPHERGIA project recently turned one year old?

Launched in October 2023 to unlock the potential of laser-assisted graphene production to shape the future of smart, self-charging textiles and next-generation Li-ion batteries, GRAPHERGIA is ready to start its second year research and innovation activities.

In fact, the team gathered in person for the second time last month in the Italian city of Prato for the 2nd Consortium Meeting to reflect on the year 1 achievements and to plan the next crucial steps, in a session hosted by Next Technology Tecnotessile.

During two days, our partners focused on planning how they will collaborate on the different technical tasks, and on the importance of regular working meetings, but they also watched the GRAPHERGIA project video that we launched during the Graphene Week 2024:

 

GRAPHERGIA at the Graphene Week 2024: A Strong GrapheneEU Projects Community Is Key for our Common Good

As you can see October was a very busy month for us, not only for our meeting in Prato, also because the graphene and 2D materials community was gathered in Prague (Czech Republic) by the Graphene Flagship in the Graphene Week 2024, celebrated from the 14th to the 18th of October.

During the Graphene Week, we co-organized a workshop with our sibling Project ARMS titled “Integrating Graphene Innovations: From Smart Textiles to High-Performance Energy Storage”, that was attended by about 150 people, who actively participated after each presenter asking questions in vivid discussions. This joint workshop delved into the transformative potential of graphene and 2D materials in shaping the future of sustainable energy.

ARMS and GRAPHERGIA are pushing the boundaries of technology to create eco-friendly, high-performance energy solutions that will power the next generation of devices and applications.

Despoina Batsouli (Adamant Composites), Jinhua Sun (Chalmers University of Technology), Hamed Pourkheirollah (Tampere University), Benedetto Bozzini (Politecnico di Milano), Phillipe Basset (Université Gustave Eiffel), and Spyros Yannopoulos (FORTH)

The organizers were Spyros Yannopoulos and Magda Spella, from our coordinator Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), together with Hamed Pourkheirollah, from the ARMS Project. They invited as speakers:

  • Benedetto Bozzini, Full Professor of Applied Physical Chemistry, Battery Materials Engineering Laboratory Coordinator and Executive Committee Member of the Dept. of Energy at Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He offered the Plenary Talk “Multimodal spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging of Zn-air batteries”.
  • Jinhua Sun, Associate Professor of Materials and Manufacturing, Department of Industrial and Materials Science, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). His presentation focused on “Tailoring the surface chemistry and assembling structure of 2D materials for supercapacitors and batteries”.
  • Hamed Pourkheirollah, Researcher at the Tampere University (Finland). He spoke about “Advancements in Supercapacitor Technology: Optimizing Graphene-Enhanced Carbon Materials for Printed Supercapacitor Applications”.
  • Despoina Batsouli, Materials Engineer, MSc, Head of Advanced Materials Division at Adamant Composites (Greece). She titled her presentation “A single-step, eco-friendly technique for depositing highquality graphene utilizing laser-assisted methods”.
  • Philippe Basset, Professor of Electronic, Microelectronic and MicroElectro-Mechanical Systems, Department of Health, Energy and Sustainable Environment at Gustave Eiffel University (France), who explained his research on “Conditioning systems for triboelectric nanogenerators incorporating graphene material”.

Even if the highlight of GRAPHERGIA’s participation in the Graphene Week 2024 was this workshop, we also presented two posters. On Tuesday, Despoina joined the Poster Session A to speak about how GRAPHERGIA is powering future energy with graphene in an evening accompanied by some drinks. The day after, on Wednesday, Elena Merli also presented a second poster about our project in the Poster Session B, in a full room of graphene and 2D materials academics and innovators willing to learn from each other’s research.

Since we were already in Prague, we also joined the Graphene Flagship Annual Meeting, in which our coordinator Spyros Yannopoulos presented GRAPHERGIA, and where we could learn the importance of collaboration with the rest of our sibling projects.

“If we hadn’t had the Graphene Flagship, we would have been significantly behind the rest of the world, including Asia and America. That is why a sense of community is key”. – Patrik Johansson, Director of the Graphene Flagship.

Spreading the word about GRAPHERGIA’s Research: Our 2024 Events

There is no doubt the Graphene Week 2024 was the event of the year for GRAPHERGIA, however, our partners have spread the word about our research and innovation activities in many other events:

Philippe Basset, Professor at ESIEE PARIS and Director of ESYCOM Lab at the Université Gustave Eiffel, co-chaired the symposium “Self-powered sensors based on nanogenerators”, at the European Materials Research Society (e-MRS) 2024 Spring Meeting.

Our project coordinator, Sypros Yannopoulos, Prof. at the Department of Chemistry (University of Patras) and associated Research Director at Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), participated in the ICOOPMA 2024 conference as an invited speaker presenting the basic concepts and first results of their work related to the GRAPHERGIA project, with particular emphasis on the use of laser sources to produce high-quality graphene.

Spyros presented the GRAPHERGIA project in the workshop “Synergizing Sustainability: Integrating Advanced Energy Storage with Harvesting for Wearable Electronics” in a satellite event of the IEEE FLEPS Conference 2024. In this workshop other EU-funded projects also participated: SOLiD Project, SUPERIOT and Project ARMS.

“Sapienza” University of Rome hosted the 28th International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS 2024). As a curious fact, 15 of the talks offered during the conference days contained the word “graphene” in their title or abstract. Our partner Tullio Scopigno mentioned GRAPHERGIA in some acknowledgement slides of his talk.

Philippe Basset offered a keynote in the Symposium 6 “Electromechanical Coupling Materials for Nanogenerators and Self-powered Electronics”, part of the Materials Challenges in Alternative and Renewable Energy 2024 Conference (MCARE 2024).

“Electrochemical Energy Storage Materials and Processes” was the title of the workshop organised by GRAPHERGIA together with two more European Commission-funded projects, EMPHASIS-Supercaps and INERRANT Batteries, as part of the Horizon Europe Satellite Event at the 15th International Conference on Solid State Chemistry 2024.

Eleni Amirali, a PhD student from Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), participated in the XXXVIII Panhellenic Conference on Solid State Physics and Materials Science, speaking about her GRAPHERGIA research in her presentation ‘From pristine PAN to carbon fibers: A morphological and chemical investigation’.

Bilge Saruhan-Brings, Senior Scientist at the GRAPHERGIA partner Institute of Materials Research of DLR (German Aerospace Center), participated in the 50th edition of the conference series of the International Conference on Micro-and Nano Engineering (MNE) with an oral presentation titled “Fabrication of Laser-induced Micro-Supercapacitors for structurally-integrated power storage systems”.

Unveiling the Team Behind the GRAPHERGIA Project: Meet some of our Partners

GRAPHERGIA is formed by a consortium of 11 research and industrial partners from 6 European countries, coordinated by Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH).

Meet some of them to discover how they are involved in our project:

Stay tuned to our activities to follow us on our journey that will change our energy landscape with smart self-charging textiles and next-generation Li-ion batteries for a climate-neutral future!

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This newsletter was originally published on LinkedIn.