Time flies when you’re busy. Perhaps that’s why it seems incredible that six months have already passed since we began working together on SPARK-e. Six months! That’s half a year, isn’t it? During this time, naturally, we have been laying the foundations of our project, as what we aim to achieve is no simple task: Phase Change Materials (PCMs) offer incredible potential for improving the performance of our electronic devices. However, most commercial technologies based on these materials still rely on critical raw materials (CRMs) and other strategic components.
At SPARK-e, we have set ourselves two clear, but challenging objectives: on one hand, we want to design an alternative to current PCMs based on solid-state materials, while on the other, we will explore the capacity of these materials to transform thermal energy into useful electrical energy.
To achieve our goals, we must work together with completely transparent and horizontal communication, and this is precisely what partner meetings accomplish, and such was the case of our online General Assembly held on the 30th of April.
To celebrate SPARK-e’s first six months of operation in the real world, we held our second General Assembly, in this case a digital meeting where we shared the progress we have made during these months. As always, the greatest lessons come with obstacles and doubts, and that is why most of our meeting was taken up with scientific debates. We want our project to work on paper, but also in reality, and that involves establishing which objectives are realistic, which processes will work outside the laboratory, and who might be interested in our technology.
We began our meeting with a presentation by our Project Manager, Alba Helena Pérez Jimeno, who updated us on the team’s general progress and the milestones. Good news, we’re on the right track and have already reached some important KPIs, both scientific and non-scientific.
Next, we moved on to the discussion and analysis of the scientific work packages, which are the true corte of the project: our researchers explored the first steps regarding heat dissipation and energy harvesting, the two main objectives of SPARK-e. We also discussed one of the greatest challenges we will face in the coming years: how to maintain heat transfer phenomena when moving from the nanoscale to the chip scale.
We also addressed how our project’s day-to-day communication will look and how to make our research and results attractive to potential industrial partners in the future. Finally, we organised our next steps within the Effitronics portfolio, of which we are a part alongside other EU-funded projects.
Meetings like these, whether in person or online, are more than necessary to put a face to the names, establish a roadmap for our project, and, occasionally, share a few jokes, such as asking if the consortium provides coffee via video call.
Now, it’s time to get back to work, but with our sights set on our next meeting!