EU Graphene Flagship signals industrial 2D materials
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EU Graphene Flagship signals industrial 2D materials graphene-flagship.eu
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The showcase set out to demonstrate that graphene is more than a laboratory novelty. Frank Koppens, chair of the Graphene Flagship’s MWC Committee, says that the idea was to demonstrate that “now it is time for graphene to be moved from the laboratory onto the factory floor.” The Graphene Flagship was launched as an initiative in 2017 with a heavy emphasis on “market-motivated, industry-led targeted sub-projects.” The yardstick for these projects is their progress in improving the “technology readiness level,” a term devised by NASA. The “TRL” is a widely used measure for benchmarking the maturity of a technology. Confirming that graphene really does have commercial potential is important to avoid the fate of other recent materials “breakthroughs,” such as high-temperature superconductors and C60 (buckyball), which failed to transition from academic research papers to products and profits. Both materials made newspaper headlines, and, like graphene, collected Nobel prizes, but with little apparent commercial impact. The Graphene Flagship, now halfway through its 10-year program, is a concerted effort to avoid this fate. As Jari Kinaret, director of the Graphene Flagship, puts it, the initiative has an “overarching goal of taking graphene from academic laboratories to society.” The Flagship now uses the phrase “graphene and related mateIn May 2019, the Graphene Flagship embarked on a campaign of rials” or GRMs, to rezero-gravity parabolic flights to test novel thermal management flect the fact that it now graphene devices for space applications. The unique properties supports R&D in other of graphene can significantly improve the performance of the two-dimensional (2D) devices. Credit: Graphene Flagship.
n recent years, the 100,000 visitors to Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), the annual get-together for the mobile telecommunications industry, have been able to see how developments in graphene could “transform future telecommunications.” In February of this year, 26 industrial and academic partners exhibited 20 working demonstrators and prototypes related to graphene at the MWC. These devices, on show in the Graphene Pavilion, focused on “The Phone of the Future,” “Wearables of the Future,” and “The Home of the Future.” The Graphene Pavilion at MWC is the brainchild of the EU’s Graphene Flagship Innovation Team. Supported by the European Commission, the Graphene Flagship is an EU initiative that “aims to secure a major role for Europe in the ongoing technological revolution, helping to bring graphene innovation out of the laboratory and into commercial applications by 2023” (see MRS Bulletin, doi:10.1557/ mrs.2017.14).
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materials beyond graphene. For example, the Flagship has also backed work on bilayers of graphene and boron nitride and on 2D silicon. The Flagship operates through a series of “work packages.” One part of this activity, aimed specifically at industrialization, sets out to convince potential commercial users t
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