Researchers from MIT have created a new organic solar cell that uses transparent Graphene based electrodes. The new electrodes are made by using AuCl3 to dope graphene, which makes it more durable and more efficient.
Transparent solar cells are useful because they can be used inside windows, and researchers are looking to replace ITO that is used in current designs.
Researchers from Nanotek Instruments have developed a new graphene-based supercapacitor that can store as much energy as NiMH batteries, but charge and discharge in minutes or even seconds. The new device has a specific energy density of 85.6 Wh/kg at room temperature and 136 Wh/kg at 80 °C. These are the highest ever values for "electric double layer" supercapacitors based on carbon nanomaterials.
Curved graphene sheets
The new supercapcitor has electrodes made of graphene mixed with 5wt% Super P (an acetylene black that acts as a conductive additive) and 10wt% PTFE binder. A sheet of carbon just one atom thick, graphene is a very good electrical conductor as well as being extremely strong and flexible.
We just found a couple of great short vidoes explaining about carbon and Graphene. The videos are presented by Dr. Jonathan Hare (who also wrote them) - who runs the creative science center in Sussex, UK. The first video is an introduction to Graphene: what is it, why is it important and how we can make our own Graphene sheets:
Researchers from the Nankai University in china have developed a new drug delivery system that uses Graphene Oxide as the drug carrier. Graphene oxide has a very high surface area, enabling it to transport a large amount of the drug.
The team attached superparamagnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles to the graphene oxide, which allows allows the carrier to be targeted to the tumor site by an external magnetic field.
An international team of physicists discovered that the polarization of light can be rotated by almost 6° as it passes through a single sheet of graphene in a magnetic field. The team believes that graphene could be exploited in new devices that switch light using electric and magnetic fields.
Graphene was not expected to generate a large rotation because the angle is proportional to the thickness of the material in magnetic fields, and Graphene is just one atomic layer thick.
UK's Durham Graphene Science (DGS) is a new startup (spin-off from the Durham University) that will produce Graphene on a large scale. It has got a £100,000 ($160,000) investment from Nothstar Ventures. DGS has a new method to create Graphene by assembling atoms within a reactor.
Physicists from the Rice University developed a new way to grow Graphene - using sugar and other molecules. It turns out that placing carbon-rich sources such as sugar on substrates made out of nickel and copper resulted in the formations of layers of graphene whose traits could be controlled.
This method creates nearly-perfect Graphene, and it needs "only" 800 degrees heat - as opposed to 1000 degrees some other approach use (at 800 degrees, the underlying silicon remains active for electronics, whereas at 1,000 degrees, it loses its critical dopants).
Researchers from Empa in Switzerland have fabricated graphene-like materials using a surface chemical route and clarified in detail the corresponding reaction pathway. Using a prototypical polyphenylene precursor, the researchers clarified, together with scientists at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Zurich, how the reaction pathway runs in detail on a copper surface and how the building blocks can be transformed into planar nanographenes directly on the surface.
For their investigations the researchers combined empirical observations, in particular from scanning tunneling microscopy with computer simulations. The simulations are used to determine whether a theoretically possible reaction step is energetically possible or not. The result: the reaction pathway consists of six steps with five intermediate products. Two of them are stabilized by the surface so that they can be stably imaged with the scanning tunneling microscope. The reaction barriers connecting the different intermediates are lowered through a catalytic effect of the substrate.
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (who won the 2010 Nobel prize in Physics for discovering Graphene) have now developed a new material called Fluorographene - it is as strong as Graphene but does not conduct electricity at all. The group placed a fluorine atom at every single carbon atom, thereby destroying the electron cloud and preventing electricity from flowing under normal conditions, but not impinging on the structural integrity of the carbon framework.
They say that the properties of the new material are very similar to Teflon, and in fact they call it "2D Teflon".
Nobel Prize laureate Konstantin Novoselov says that making Graphene is easy: all you need is a mobile phone, Graphite from a pencil and a scotch tape. You stick the tape to the Graphite and transfer it to a solid substrate, the mobile phone's screen in that case. He also says that Drinking Vodka can help as it can degrease the surface...
All you need is a good quality graphite and preparing the substrate, says Konstantin.