Current technological trends require the precise deposition of highly resolved features, in a direct writing approach which preserve their structural and electronic properties upon transfer, while increasing the number of components that can be integrated in a single device. Over the past decade, printed electronics technology has evolved and is now used in applications such as flexible screens, intelligent labels and packaging. Among the printing techniques, Laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) technique is capable of printing electrical circuits quite inexpensively and quickly. At the same time, this technique is environmentally friendly and has no restrictions in terms of viscosity. In this work we highlight the newest trends of LIFT manufacturing for the development of a variety of components with electronic, optoelectronic and sensing functionality such as RFID antennas, RF transmission lines, organic thin-film transistors, metallic interconnects, circuits defects repairing and biochemical sensors.

At the same time, the increasingly demanding requirements have highlighted the need of a more thorough, all-embracing research regarding the rheological characteristics of the printable fluids, their jetting dynamics and their electrical, post-sintering properties, that will define the process' reliability, aiming towards its industrialization.

Graphene’s optical response is characterized by constant absorption in the visible, electrically tunable absorption in the NIR-SWIR and plasmonic excitations in the midIR-LWIR spectrum. These traits make for interesting applications in photodetection, light modulation and sensing. To make the response more efficient and competitive, however, the small overall absorption in graphene must be overcome by integrating graphene with resonant photonic or plasmonic cavities. Strong light absorption within the resonators creates hot electrons and temperature gradients. In a comprehensive modeling and design scheme of graphene-based optoelectronic applications, the optical, thermal, and electrical responses must be considered within a self-consistent approach: absorption creates hot carriers, whose temperature distribution is determined by the thermal properties of graphene and the appropriate relaxation pathways and corresponding rates. But the thermal properties and the absorption in graphene are themselves functions of the temperature. After a short introduction in graphene physics and computational methods, we will go over our recent studies on several graphene-based optoelectronic devices.

In the last decade computational methods have become one of the most powerful tools in science and technology, offering an unprecedented capability in understanding mechanisms and processes down to the atomic level. One of the areas that have mostly benefited from the swift development of computational capabilities, is Biomedicine. Despite the complexity that usually characterizes the structure and the thermodynamics of biomolecular systems, simulational methods have managed to provide information not easily accessible (or not accessible at all) to pertinent experimental techniques. In particular, as far as it concerns the effort towards designing optimized nanovectors for biomedical purposes, computer simulations have offered the possibility to elucidate the role of different parameters which essentially control the physical properties of such systems. In this presentation we will focus on cases of fully atomistic in-silico studies of polymer and lipid-based constructs for drug and gene-delivery applications, examining structural, dynamic and thermodynamic aspects affecting their physicochemical behavior. The  goal of such studies is to provide new insight towards a bottom-up approach for the design of nanosystems with optimized loading and delivery properties, toward an enhancement of their therapeutical impact.

Soft matter under confinement is a growing, interdisciplinary research field with yet unknown basic principles. Nanoporous hard templates provide a two-dimensionally confined space in which self-organization processes such as crystallization, protein secondary structure formation, mesophase formation and phase separation can be manipulated giving rise to unprecedented confinement-induced morphologies with new and exciting properties. A principal focus of the current work is finding the basic underlying principles that give rise to directed self-organization and controlled phase state in a range of soft materials under confinement. It involves structural, thermodynamic and dynamical characterization (with Dielectric Spectroscopy) in a number of soft materials with different types of interactions. These include amorphous and crystallizable polymers, rod- and disk-like liquid crystals and biopolymers with important potential applications. Implications of this work to the confined crystallization of other systems (like water) is discussed.

The work is supported by the by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant” (Project Number: 183).

One of the most promising potential applications of porous graphene has been that of membrane for gas separation. In this presentation, we include an introductory review of  this topic both experimentally and theoretically, showing attempts to overcome a main obstacle in creating useful devices. We then present our theoretical work which concerns the permeation of several molecular systems through pores in single layer graphene with the goal to determine the size and type of pores with optimal permeability and selectivity.

Our study was performed at the level of DFT (hybrid-meta GGA functionals). We particularly focused on pores that are created by carbon vacancies and nitrogen doping (pyridinic, pyrrolic defects). We demonstrate that the size of interest for gas separation is 0.5 nm and show examples of pores with industrially acceptable permeance that can effectively separate gases. Finally, we turn our attention to pore stacking in bilayer graphene which are studied with atomistic simulations. We show that combinations of pores can be used to control molecular permeability.