CarboSafe – Innovation Alliance Carbon Nanotubes: Innovation for industry and society
A transparent safety concept will create trust and confidence in CNT products. To ensure the safety of carbon nanotubes and the products based on them, potential risks have to be evaluated and adequately communicated. A prerequisite for this is a sound knowledge of possible exposure routes and the action of carbon nanotubes in contact with biological systems. The development of test methods to determine the exposure and to characterize carbon nanotubes is another important module. The innovation alliance CNT will tackle these challenges in a cross sectional project called CarboSafe. The basic objective is to develop reliable measuring technologies for unambiguously determining the release rates of nanoparticles in the lifecycle of CNT-based products. Furthermore, the CarboSafe project aims to identify the ecotoxicological potential of carbon nanotubes and to accurately estimate the risk potential with the aid of newly developed measuring technologies. The findings obtained here will Supplement a number of other studies and projects that currently deal with the safety aspects of carbon nanotubes. They include, for example, the TRACER project supported by the BMBF, which will provide an important basis for the CarboSafe project. TRACER has been involved with the risk assessment of CNTs along the entire value chain since 2006, and aims to derive recommendations for handling carbon nanotubes during their production and processing, and during the use of potential end products.
Further Information on the project CarboSafe as well as on the InnoCNT-Alliance can be found on www.inno-cnt.de/en/.
- CarboSafe Project Data Sheet (in German) (PDF; 200 KB).
Grant Number: BMBF - FKZ 03X0043
Duration: 01.04.2008 - 31.03.2012