Graphene Flagship announces 11 Spearhead Projects

Following the success of the first graphene-enabled solar farm last year, the research project will invest €45 million in projects with industry partners, such as Airbus, Lufthansa Technik, Siemens and ABB who will contribute another €47m.

The 11 projects include GRAPES, to improve the stability of graphene-based perovskite solar panels, GRAPHIL, for a water filtration systems and some interesting automotive uses for graphene.

One is the AUTOVISION project to develop vision sensors in autonomous vehicles, with partners Aixtron, UK and Veoneer, Sweden.

The project will produce cmos graphene quantum dot image sensors in prototype sensor systems for vehicles to detect obstacles and road curvature even in extreme and difficult driving conditions, like thick fog. They will be used in place of lidar sensors which relies on a pulsed laser to measure distances and objects but this is a relatively slow-processing technology, said the Graphene Flagship.

Recently, monolithic integration of a CMOS integrated circuit with graphene has been made possible, enabling high-resolution image sensing that detects UV, visible, infrared and even teraHz frequencies, it added.

The sensor’s ability to see in the infrared means that graphene cmos sensors can be used as part of a self-driving car’s automatic braking system. Collision avoidance systems could be a crucial application for graphene, the research group said.

Another automotive project is backed by Centro Ricerche Fiat and other industry partners. The G+BOARD project will develop a graphene-based dashboard. A metal-free dashboard could reduce manufacturing costs and fuel consumption for users.

The G+BOARD will be simpler to assemble and dismantle for recycling compared with metal dashboards.