An international training program between scientists and engineers from the University of Waterloo and partners in Germany got $1.65-million in federal funding from NSERC. The nine-year initiative will train dozens of graduate students and help bring promising new two-dimensional materials out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.
Through workshops, international exchanges and industry partnerships, the objective is to provide almost five dozen graduate students in Canada, and a similar number in Germany, with the know-how to scale up the production of 2D materials and make them commercially viable.
Two-dimensional materials such as graphene - the first one to be discovered by Nobel Prize-winning researchers - can be made as thin as a single layer of atoms.
That gives them special properties, such as extremely high surface area, and a wide range of potential uses including in transistors for high-speed computers, smaller, lighter, longer-lasting batteries, and composite tennis racquets.
'A little goes a long way'
Essentially, you can replace other materials that were used for strengthening with a much smaller amount and get higher performance.
Engineers and scientists around the world are now searching for other materials that can be fabricated in 2D – there are believed to be about 2,000 of them – and developing ways to economically produce them in sufficient quantities for commercialization.
Students in the 2D-MATURE program will also learn about business-related subjects such as intellectual property laws, and the impact of mining for precursor materials on Indigenous people in areas including Northern Ontario and Quebec.
With cash and in-kind support from the University of Waterloo, funding for the Canadian researchers is over $4 million. The federal support was awarded through NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program.
'We're hoping to bridge that gap'
The collaboration involves ten professors from the University of Waterloo as well as experts at the University of Duisburg-Essen and RWTH Aachen University.
Profs. Germán Sciaini and Rodney Smith from the Department of Chemistry are involved with project 2D-MATURE as well as eight engineers - Michael Pop and Zhongwei Chen (chemical engineering), Na Young Kim and Irene Goldthorpe (electrical and computer engineering), Kyle Daun and Kevin Musselman (mechanical and mechatronics engineering). Sciani holds the Canada Research Chair in Atomically Resolved Dynamics and Ultrafast High-Resolution Imaging.
“It’s difficult to go from the lab to commercialization because there are so many nuances along the way that must be understood as you scale up. We’re hoping to bridge that gap between research and the commercial use of 2D materials,” said Pope, who is leading the initiative for Waterloo.