Functional materials

We develop novel functional materials for applications ranging from tissue engineering, to transparent electrodes. A common theme in our functional materials research is the use of self-assembled nanowires, either of metal, e.g. silver nanowires, or carbon nanotubes.

Development of textiles

One part of our functional materials research focuses on development of textiles based on carbon nanotube (CNT) fibres. Twisting fibres into yarns and then knitting or weaving the yarns into a fabric facilitates the formation of 2D and 3D well defined porous structures with versatile porosity and ultra-high specific surface area, providing a highly conductive, low density scaffold for energy storage, and for tissue engineering.

Our functional thin films and textiles based on carbon nanotubes, graphene and nanomaterial/peptide hybrid structures are perfect candidates for culturing cells in the 2D and 3D environment. We work together with our colleagues in the School of Veterinary Medicine to apply these textiles to uses for animal health.

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This research activity is led by Izabela Jurewicz.

Improving touch screen applications

Also, in collaboration with the University of Sussex and M-SOLV, we have developed silver nanowire (AgNW) transparent electrodes specifically tailored for flexible touch screen applications. We fabricated for the first time a fully operating five inch multi-touch highly-pixelated AgNW sensor with comparable performance to the one based on ITO typically used in smart phone technology.

We also showed that the finite-size scaling theory can be successfully applied for the fundamental understanding of touch sensors performance of where highly pixelated sensor structures are essential, such as in single-layer capacitive touch sensors but also in LCD and OLED display panels.