Nokia - Page 2

Researchers from Nokia's Research Center in Cambridge developed a new humidity sensor based on graphene oxide. The researchers say that the new sensor is ultra fast (the fastest humidity sensor ever reported, in fact), thanks to the graphene 2D structure and its superpermeability to water molecules. The sensor Nokia developed is thin (15 nm), transparent and flexible.

The sensor's response and recovery time (the time to go from 10% to 90% of the high humidity value and vice versa) is less than 100 ms. The response rate is a function of the thickness of the GO, the thicker the film, the slower the sensor. Nokia has filed several patent applications regarding this work.

In January 2013 Europe selected the Graphene Flagship as its first $1 billion 10-year research program. Now, almost a year later, the project was officially launched in a ceremony led by Wolfgang Bosch of the European Commission, Karin Markides, President of Chalmers University of Technology, and Nokia's representative Tapani Ryhänen.

The graphene flagship project is led by theoretical physicist Jari Kinaret at Chalmers University. The consortium includes 75 academic and industrial partners from 17 European countries. The project will focus on developing graphene applications in the computing, batteries and sensor markets.

The wall street journal posted an interesting article and video on graphene. The article discusses the current state of research and business, possible graphene applications and the rush to patent related technologies.

The article starts with the Cambridge graphene research center and then discusses several companies and their graphene programs, including IBM, Nokia, BlueStone Global Tech, Vorbeck Materials, Lockheed Martin and Aixtron.

New research done by Nokia shows that mechanically flexible all-solid state batteries can be made from monolayer graphene (provided by Graphenea and grown by CVD directly onto copper foil). The total thickness of the resulting battery was about 50 micrometer. The complete structure is a cathode graphene (on copper foil), polymer electrolyte, and anode lithium foil

The researchers report that the ultrathin battery showed the highest energy density of 10 W h L^-1 and the highest power density of 300 W L^-1. It also shows excellent cyclic stability and sustains a discharge current density of 100 microA cm^-2 over 100 cycles, maintaining energy capacity over 0.02 mA h cm^-2.

The ten-year European graphene research program (called FET - Graphene Flagship) was awarded €1 billion. This project includes 74 partners, and Spain's Graphenea was happy to tell us that their the main graphene producer for this project.

Graphenea has a pilot line with a capacity of 50,000 cm²/year of CVD graphene. The company plans to extend this line to 130 milion cm²/year in the near future (that's 2600 times the current capacity!).

The UK announced extra funding of £21.5 million ($34.7 million) to boost graphene research and development in the UK. This new investment fund aims to "take the technology from the lab to the factory floor".

The Imperial College in London will receive the largest sum (£4.5 million) to investigate aerospace applications of graphene. Other projects are based at Durham University, the University of Manchester, the University of Bath together with the University of Exeter (£1.1  million) and Royal Holloway. All of those universities will collaborate with industrial partners (including Nokia, BAE Systems, Procter & Gamble, Qinetiq, Rolls-Royce, Dyson, Sharp and Philips Research). The commercial companies will take part in the funding and will invest £12 million more.

Graphenea has launched an online store, and the company now offers several graphene materials including CVD graphene films (on SiO₂, copper and any substrate that the customer provides), graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide. The company is also building a distribution network in main graphene markets (such as the US, Japan and Korea).

Graphenea has a pilot line with a capacity of 50,000 cm²/year and they plan to expand it during 2013. Graphenea says that their customer list includes Nokia, Philips, Corning and ASML.

Nokia filed a new patent for a graphene-based photo detector. The new detector uses graphene as a photo-collecting layer, and also uses a graphene nanoribbon that acts as a field effect transistor to amplify the current and transfer it to the control electronics. Stacking several such detectors on top of each other with color filters can be done to detect colors.

The big advantage of this graphene-based photo detector is graphene's transparency. The graphene sheet itself absorbs only 2.3% of the light (and does it very evenly across the whole light spectrum) and so should perform much better than CMOS in low light conditions. The graphene sensor will also be vastly thinner than current technologies, and potentially cheaper to produce (once graphene itself is available on the cheap).

Nokia posted an interesting blog post today about Graphene. It turns out that the Nokia Research Center is part of Graphene-CA, the EU's ambitious 10-year 1 billion Euro research initiative. Apparently Nokia is quite excited about the new 'super' material - which enable new devices - such as the Morph concept shown below: