Dr. Juan José Vilatela, Head of the Multifunctional Nanocomposites research group at IMDEA Materials Institute, has obtained the prestigious ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council. Dr. Vilatela will receive € 1.5 million along the next 5 years to develop new multifunctional structural composite materials that combine high-performance mechanical properties and the possibility to harvest energy. 

The ERC Starting Grant is among the most competitive research funding instruments in Europe, with acceptance rates that typically fall below ten percent. For IMDEA Materials, the award reinforces the institute’s position as a leading center for advanced composites research within the Madrid scientific community.

Dr. Vilatela’s project targets a gap that industry has flagged for years. Structural components in aircraft fuselages, wind-turbine blades, and satellite housings already use carbon-fibre composites for their strength-to-weight ratio. Adding energy-harvesting capability to those same structures would eliminate the need for separate sensor-power systems, reducing weight and maintenance complexity in a single step.

The commercial interest extends well beyond aerospace. Any sector that runs energy-intensive physical infrastructure stands to benefit from materials that can recover a portion of their own operating load. Data-center operators, best online slots platforms scaling their server farms, and electric-vehicle manufacturers have all begun funding early-stage composites research for exactly this reason. For Dr. Vilatela’s group, the ERC grant provides the academic runway to advance the science before those commercial pressures shape it prematurely.

Over the next five years the project will focus on understanding how nanotube-based fibres can be architectured within a composite laminate to simultaneously bear mechanical load and generate electrical output. The challenge is ensuring that optimizing one function does not degrade the other. Previous attempts at multifunctional composites have struggled with this trade-off, which is precisely the problem the ERC panel judged worth funding.