Dear all
First we are sad to announce that one of our WMF founding friends, Arkema Chief Technical Officer, Christian Collette passed away on April 24th. We will miss his scientific vision, his leadership style and his exceptional kindness. And we will of course honor his memory at WMF 2021.
The good news is that following President Macron's last week announcements, WMF 2021 is confirmed in Nancy at the set dates and with a superb program.
Then the usual flow of papers about critical resources: an interesting point of view by Orovel suggesting better communication to support public recognition of fuel cells at the same level as this of EV batteries, a review by Bloomberg of History and perspectives of EV batteries chemistry and the resulting use of critical materials, a safer and greener way to extract copper highlighted by Mining.com compared to current methods such as chemical vapor deposition, sputtering and femtosecond laser ablation, the project developed at Aalto University to reuse rather than recycle Lithium Ion electrodes containing cobalt and the road from Urban mine to magnet motors presented by EIT Raw Materials.
Further on the scientific front with a study by Universities of Bochum and Duisburg showing Copper- Boron as a promising catalyst to turn CO2 into Fuel, an interesting review of the plastic and metal fast growing 3D printing industry, Karlsruhe University using light to operate quantum information processing systems, Cornell University proposing Aluminium/Zinc battery anodes, Oxys Energy making sulfur solid state batteries available for trials in Q3 2021, Berkeley's promising project of indefinitely recyclable plastic and Wurzburg University developing Boron nitride as a material for future quantum sensor technology.
On the sustainability front, we picked 3 examples: the project to power batteries with nuclear wastes, Saint Gobain and Addionics cooperating on long range solid state batteries and Ammonia being part of the future Hydrogen supply chain for Thyssen Krupp.
16 of our great Start Up Alumni are in the news this month with nomination (Demeta - France), fund raising (Carbios - France, Materials Zone - Israel, Rein4CED - Belgium), cooperation with industry partner (Kebotix - USA, Mosaic Materials - USA, Ramlab - NL) or media coverage (Akryvia - France, BComp - Switzerland, Brimstone Energy - USA, Citrine Informatics - USA, CompPair - Switzerland, Cyclopure - USA, EH Group - Switzerland, Opus 12 - USA, Spin Ion - France).
