CEllulosic MAterials Optimized for radiofrequency and terahertz applications – MACEO

The paper industry mainly produces and markets commodity products with production capacity underutilized, resulting low selling prices and margins. CTP and its partners have been working for several years to change this situation by adding new functions to conventional products to bring added value through printed electronics technologies. Market studies clearly indicate colossal markets accessible to French and European companies considering the processes involved. Although historically printed electronics has been developed on plastic, cellulosic papers and boards appear as good candidates. Their advantages are: bio-based, renewable, recycled at 72% against 18% for plastics, they are also cheaper, easily printed at high speed and on large surfaces. The origins of this project come from earlier developments, such as: selective filtering of electromagnetic waves by wallpapers for mobile phone or wifi, chipless RFID implementation printed directly onto packaging, or the use of an electromagnetic energy harvesting device for anti-counterfeiting applications. The addressed markets are colossal: the wallpapers filtering waves represent surfaces of about 160 million m² only for France and the field of housing, chipless RFID tags are expected to reach over 100 billion of units in 2020 and doubled in 2021, finally counterfeiting losses represent more than 200 billion of euros per year worldwide, not taking into account the degradation of the brand image of companies, hundreds of thousands of jobs threatened in Europe and even health risks. However, these projects have clearly shown that the performances obtained are strongly limited by dielectric losses, significantly higher in cellulosic materials than for conventional materials. The objective of the MACEO project is to understand what causes these losses and to find solutions to reduce them in order for the applications to achieve full performance. More precisely the consortium will: 1) Identify and model the physico-chemical origins of loss phenomena in the cellulosic materials, 2) Develop, test and optimize a new generation of cellulosic substrates with low losses - target gain factor=100, 3) Validate the manufacture of these materials by keeping constant the other characteristics: mechanical and optical properties, the recyclability and the low environmental impact of actual materials, 4) Quantify the gains obtained through the production of demonstrators in 1-10GHz and THz bands. Such low loss biobased materials don't exist and works on that particular area of cellulosic materials are nonexistent. Research has been done on other materials, oil based, to reduce losses. However they can not be transferred to cellulosic materials because the physico-chemistry are completely different. MACEO is a multidisciplinary project, ambitious but realistic, from fundamental to applied research with the development of targeted demonstrators. The project is perfectly adapted to the guidelines of ANR, with a PRCE financing type for a win-win collaboration on advanced research with two academic laboratories, experts of the scientific heart of the project, cellulose and electromagnetism, a technology center and a company. The recognized expertise of the partners coupled with their shared experience of collaborative projects will ensure the success of MACEO, strongly supported by the Techtera pole.