NAIMO at a glance

Project objectives

Project ambition: Creating the technological environment to develop a new sustainable industry of organic electronics to finally improve the quality of life of European citizens.

Scientific objective: NAIMO will create cost and energy-effective processing and manufacturing methods for assembling nanomaterials onto flexible polymer films.

Technological objective: Production of flexible organic electronic circuits for electronic labels, electronic paper, solar cells, displays, sensors….

EU political and societal objective: Translating research excellence into wealth-generating products and processes.

Project characteristics

Project Reference: NMP4-CT-2004-500355

Contract Type: Integrated Project

Start Date: 2004-04-01

End Date: 2008-03-31

Duration: 48 months

Project Status: Execution

Project Cost: 23.54 million euro

EU Funding: 14.90 million euro

The NAIMO project is structured in 8 workpackages :

  • Multifunctional materials by design for nanofabrication
  • Nanofabrication and nanoscale processing of multifunctional materials
  • Theory, simulations and modelling of materials, processes and systems
  • Multifunctionality through integration of nanofabrication and self organizing materials
  • Assessment, Standardization
  • Nanoscale Metrology and Tools
  • Training
  • Project Co-ordination and Management

Project history

NAIMO is an extension of two previous EU projects, funded under FP5 :

MONA LISA Development of novel conjugated molecular nanostructures by lithography and their transport scaling aspects

DISCEL Self-Assembling and Self-Healing Electronic Devices Based on Mesomorphic Discotic Materials

The idea to create NAIMO was born during a scientific meeting, the NSF-EC Nanomanufacturing and Processing Workshop (January 5-7, 2002 – San Juan, Puerto Rico).

 

NAIMO description

Introduction

The main scientific and technological objective of Naimo is to deliver materials with a broad range of functionalities , including electronic, optical, sensing and magnetic capabilities. Moreover, those materials will be developed in a cost-effective and environment-friendly way.

This ambitious objective is achieved by controlling the structure of materials at the nanometer scale. Its realization requires breakthroughs in materials design, adapting processes and manufacturing techniques.

Materials

More precisely, Naimo will develop new multifunctional materials that are processed by solution-based additive manufacturing (i.e. direct printing), so that a set of materials can be added onto a wide range of structural substrates to form a composite material with a designed multifunctionality. In particular, Naimo will deliver materials, processing and manufacturing capabilities to transform a plastic film substrate into a multifunctional material with designed electronic, optical, sensing and magnetic properties.

Methods

The approach proposed by Naimo is based on the ability to control the structure of materials on different length scales:

  • Design and synthesis of molecular building blocks as polymers, small molecules and nanoparticules
  • Control of the microstructure of the building blocks at the nanometer scale
  • Assembling in thin-film multilayers at the mesoscopic scale
  • Defining components and devices at the macroscopic scale.

The main nano-fabrication method used by Naimo is self-assembling, the capability of molecules to spontaneously organize themselves in clusters having a dimension in the range between 1nm and1µm. Composite materials will be obtained with a set of new functionalities. A key-issue in this process is the understanding of the interplay between material properties and structure and the development of multi-scale theoretical models able to predict the properties not only of individual molecules but also of multifunctional assemblies incorporating those molecules.

Applications

Naimo will develop a general technological platform to deliver breakthroughs in chemistry, microelectronics, memory storage and energy. It brings together innovative research in many fields and new tools for assessment, standardization, training and evaluation of sustainability with the ambitious objective of laying the foundation for a new industry of thin-film multifunctional materials.

The immediate applications of Naimo technology are anticipated in the sectors of Energy Generation, Electronics and Sensing (Health and Safety), with the creation of new types of solar cells, electronic paper, electronic labels and biosensors.

Impact on the society

It is important to point out the environmental advantages of the technology developed by Naimo:

  • the incorporation of materials that provide a wide range of functionalities will reduce waste to a minimum,  enabling an environmentally -friendly approach
  • processing from solution under quasi-ambient  conditions cuts energy requirements to the lowest possible, bringing NAIMO to the forefront as a close-to-the environment manufacturing technology.

Naimo is contributing to the creation of new jobs in the future European Industry of multifunctional materials. Targeted education will be fundamental to create this new workforce and Naimo is already giving its contribution to the training of this workforce creating educational resources as the summer school wich will be organized every year.