Australia-European collaboration advancing electromaterials science

Australia-based researchers are in Ireland this week to team up with European collaborators who have helped drive the exciting developments in graphene, medical bionics, artificial muscles and next-generation solar cells at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES).

The global links are being celebrated this week at a special one-day symposium co-hosted by the University of Wollongong (UOW)-headquartered ACES and the Dublin-based National Centre for Sensor Research (NCSR).

Since 2005, 26 high-impact journal articles involving UOW-ACES researchers have been published with the Ireland collaborators featuring joint research and development. Research highlights with Ireland and European collaborators include wearable sensors that are changing the way clinicians and other medical professionals will diagnose, treat and monitor patient welfare.

Patch-based sensors have been developed that enable remote monitoring of vital signs and providing new approaches to diagnostics for clinicians while wearable movement sensors can aid physiotherapists in developing and monitoring training programs remotely.

The collaborative program recently resulted in development of a dynamic material platform that responds to both light and electronic stimulation. This provided unprecedented insights into how this can be used to control protein interactions on the material’s surface. Ongoing studies involve development of this platform to control cellular interactions enabling cell growth and differentiation to be controlled by light and electronic stimulation. Optical fibre communications provide an extra dimension to this burgeoning area of research.

Other European collaborations developments include a partnership with Professor Dirk Guldi at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) to develop materials that can be used in dye-sensitised solar cells. The partnership has also led to the first joint UOW/FAU PhD with a student now working at both UOW and FAU.

A group of researchers across the University of Twente (Netherlands), University of Tampere (Finland), VTT Technical Research Centre (Finland) and UOW have shown that adipose (fat) stem cells ‘stick’ better to electrically stimulated conducting polymers, even more so than those typically coated with adhesion-promoting proteins. The work is being extended to 3D polymeric scaffolds, which can significantly improve and reduce the cost of bone and vascular tissue replacements involving stem cells.

In France, Dr Philippe Poulin from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research/CNRS) in Bordeaux, France, has been helping ACES researchers devise ways of producing long lengths of microdimensional fibres with exceptional mechanical and electrical properties to be produced with application in the area of wearable energy storage.

Alongside Professor George Malliaras, Center of Microelectronics in Provence, France, researchers are engaged in the development of new bioactive formulations to be integrated into electronic devices that can be implanted in the brain with particular applications in epilepsy detection and control. With all of these studies the practical applications are based on fundamental materials science explorations into novel structures.

These breakthroughs are being expedited as researchers harness the power and almost limitless possibilities of 3D printing to turn electronics sensors into implantable or wearable devices. The layer-by-layer printing process allows new materials to be fabricated into forms not only in significantly less time but in ways previous not possible with conventional fabrication methods.