Partners from Adamant Composites and FORTH/ICE-HT each took home a poster award for innovation and sustainability
GRAPHERGIA, the Horizon Europe project developing graphene-based solutions for energy harvesting and storage, has returned from Graphene Week 2026, organised by the Graphene Flagship, with two poster awards. Graphene Week is Europe’s leading gathering for the graphene research community, bringing together scientists, engineers and industry to share the latest advances in the field and, this year, two posters presenting GRAPHERGIA’s work stood out among the competition.
The first award recognised work on using graphene-based triboelectric nanogenerators to turn the mechanical movement of aerospace composite structures into electrical signals for real-time monitoring. The second celebrated a laser-assisted technique for turning ordinary textiles into graphene-based platforms able to harvest and store their own energy, a core building block of GRAPHERGIA’s self-charging textile demonstrator. Both posters were awarded in their respective categories, and their authors from Adamant Composites and FORTH/ICE-HT returned home to Patras, Greece, each with an award in hand.
Spyros Tsiotos showcased the poster ‘’Graphene-based Triboelectric Nanogenerators in Aerospace Structures for Real-Time Mechanical Monitoring’’, which explores how graphene-based triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) can turn mechanical movement into electrical signals for real-time monitoring of aerospace composite structures. His poster won first prize in ‘’Manufacturing, Composites & Scale-Up’’.
‘’Winning first prize in Manufacturing, Composites & Scale-Up at Graphene Week is a proud moment for our team, and receiving recognition from such a knowledgeable audience encourages us to keep advancing towards practical, scalable applications’’, said Spyros Tsiotos, Junior Materials and Processes Engineer, Adamant Composites Ltd.
Markos Anagnostakos’ and Spyros Yannopoulos’ poster received the award for ‘’Best Poster Sustainable Use of Graphene’’. In his work, “Laser-Assisted Continuous and Patterned Graphene-on-Textile Electrodes for Energy Harvesting and Micro-Flexible Energy Storage”, co-authored with Spyros Yannopoulos, he showcases GRAPHERGIA’s scalable strategy for integrating energy-harvesting and energy-storage functionalities directly into textile platforms for wearable and self-powered electronics.
‘’We are developing a laser-assisted route for converting graphene-oxide-coated polyester textiles into conductive graphene-based architectures that serve two complementary functions: continuous conductive tracks as current collectors/electrodes for triboelectric nanogenerators, and laser-patterned interdigitated electrodes for micro-flexible supercapacitors (mfSCs). A central challenge in GRAPHERGIA is the optimal coupling of energy-harvesting and energy-storage units to realise an all-in-one self-charging textile compatible with IoT integration”, explained Markos Anagnostakos, Master’s student at the Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences (FORTH/ICE-HT)
The poster awards were the highlight of GRAPHERGIA’s participation in Graphene Week 2026, which also included an oral presentation, a workshop co-organised with Project ARMS, and a pitch of the project’s demo cases, all powering sustainable energy solutions through smart textiles and next-generation lithium-ion batteries.
The GRAPHERGIA consortium is proud of these recognitions, which celebrate the innovative approaches presented in the posters and the dedication of the partners behind them. Recognition during Graphene Week 2026 reflects the project’s progress toward practical, scalable graphene-based solutions for energy harvesting and storage.
‘’These two awards are an important recognition of the scientific quality and technological relevance of the work being carried out by the GRAPHERGIA partners. They also reflect one of the central ambitions of the project, which is to translate graphene research into scalable, application-oriented solutions for energy harvesting and storage, from smart textiles to structural monitoring. I am particularly pleased to see the work of our young researchers and project partners recognized by the Graphene Flagship community, as their creativity and commitment are essential for turning these concepts into future technologies’’. Spyros Yannopoulos, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Patras, collaborating Research Director at FORTH/ICE-HT, and GRAPHERGIA Coordinator.
About GRAPHERGIA
GRAPHERGIA is a Horizon Europe research and innovation project part of the Graphene Flagship, powering future energy with graphene. It brings together eleven academic and industrial partners from six European countries under the Greek leadership of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH).
The consortium also includes Pleione Energy GmbH (Germany); Adamant Composites Ltd. (Greece); Université Gustave Eiffel (France); Born GmbH Knitwear for Fashion and Engineering (Germany); Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza (Italy); Comsensus, DOO (Slovenia); Deutsches Zentrum für Luft–und Raumfahrt EV (Germany); Next Technology Tecnotessile (Italy); AUSTRALO Interinnov Marketing Lab SL (Spain); and Euglottia I.K.E. (Greece).
You can also download this press release from GRAPHERGIA’s Zenodo.
FOR MEDIA QUERIES
Please contact: Beatriz Garre: beatriz@australo.org