The Medium-Sized Centre funding scheme seeks to consolidate research activities across departments, faculties and universities to create a critical mass of leading researchers in strategic research areas for Singapore. Two centres – Centre for Advanced 2D Materials (CA2DM) and Singapore Centre for 3D Printing (SC3DP) have been approved in the inaugural call. 

Centre for Advanced 2D Materials

(From left to right) Professor Lim Chwee Teck, Professor Antonio H. Castro Neto, Professor Barbaros Özyilmaz and Professor Loh Kian Ping will spearhead research at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials (Photos: NUS; Graphene Research Centre)

Hosted at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials (CA2DM) is led by Professor Antonio Castro Neto of the Department of Physics, NUS.

The Centre seeks to develop theoretical and experimental understanding of 2D materials, their synthesis, development, characterisation and applications, which will have direct impact on multiple industry sectors, such as aerospace, biomedical, data storage and energy.

Revolutionary 2D materials can create new technologies and potentially form the basis for an entirely new industry for the 21st century.

Atomic layers of graphene, boron nitride, tungsten disulfide, and gold nano-particles are stacked to form a 20-angstrom thick, highly efficient, photovoltaic device

Reducing the dimensionality of materials has Generated possibilities in the development of devices with properties that are ultra-thin (nanometers instead of centimetres), ultra-light (milligrams instead of grams), flexible, wearable, bendable and energy conserving.

The industrial sectors that will be most affected by the emergence of these materials include:

• Energy: batteries and supercapacitors, transparent conductive electrodes, solar cells;
• Water: filtration membranes, desalination;
• Electronics: opto-electronics and data, memory, integrated circuits, spintronics;
• Aerospace: braking system coating, thermal management, anti-icing;
• Communications: amplifiers, frequency multipliers;
• Sensors: chemical and gas, radiation, DNA;
• Medical: anti-bacterial coatings, drug delivery, lab-on-a-chip, bio-sensing.
  

The Centre for Advanced 2D Materials is funded by NRF Singapore under the Medium-Sized Centre Grant at S$50 million. 

Singapore Centre for 3D Printing

Parts that are 3D printed by the Singapore Centre for 3D Printing (Photos: NTU)

The Singapore Centre for 3D Printing is hosted at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and focuses on manufacturing high quality metal components, and parts and products through research, education and applications.
 
It will deepen capabilities in the area of future manufacturing to explore novel processes in the aerospace, building and marine industries respectively.
 
The Centre is led by Professor Chua Chee Kai (School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, NTU), one of the most cited researchers in the world of 3D printing.
 
The Singapore Centre for 3D Printing is funded by NRF Singapore under the Medium-Sized Centre Grant at S$42 million.