The grant comes from the charity Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The charity’s remit is to support advancement of engineering-related education and research. The money is to be used for further exploration of the properties of graphene and other one-atom-thick materials, such as titanium trisulfide. When such materials are put together they form heterostructures, which provide the special properties.
Potential applications include flexible optoelectronics, energy collection, gas separation, and water desalination. The title for the grant is “Designer Nanomaterials assembled from Individual Atomic Planes.”
Graphene is a highly conducive carbon-based material, which is thin, strong and very flexible. Graphene has already been used for coating power plants, with the design of flexible computing screens, and for the nanoscale filtration of impurities from water.
The research will be led by Sir Andre Geim. Geim was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for outlining the possibilities of graphene. Working alongside Manchester will be Harvard University, National University of Singapore, ETH Zurich, and the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science.
Speaking with Controlled Environments magazine, Geim expanded on the new scientific grouping: “Our consortium combines the strength of several leading groups from around the world who made their names in research on graphene, other atomically-thin materials and their heterostructures.”
Given the rate at which new graphene technologies have emerged, in prototype form at least, the additional investment will help with many new discoveries.
