June 2013

UK's Durham Graphene Science (DGS) has qualified their graphene production process, and the company is currently looking to raise further funds in the next 6-9 months so it can scale up its production capacity.

DGS (a spin-off from Durham University) developed a unique process for synthesizing graphene from carbon using sustainable and readily available cheap feed stocks in a bottom up chemical vapor deposition process. The company raised $1.8 million in its seed round of financing in February 2012 (valuation was about $3.5 million).

The GS International & RS Group, involved with graphite mining in Sri Lanka, established a new UK-based company called Futures Technologies , to develop and produce materials based on graphite - mostly graphene materials.

GS currently sells high carbon-purity graphite online from their 21-acre mining site in Sri Lanka. Future Technologies will use this graphite and will develop a scalable graphene production process. The companies are already offering graphene oxide, and have developed conductive polymers and graphene based inks that are being tested now.

Check out this nice interview with Paul Gill, President & CEO of Lomiko Metals in which he explains how he first heard and got in touch with Graphene Labs via twitter and the logic behind their strategic alliance announced in February:

Paul also mentions super-capacitor related research, and from what I understand that will be the focus of Lumiko Metal's new R&D team.

We're happy to launch the Graphene-Info newsletter, a free monthly publication focused on graphene. This is a great way to stay updated on all the important news regarding graphene technology, industry and market.

Attaching molecules to graphene is required for several applications (for example, attaching bio-molecules to enable bio-sensors), but graphene rejects these molecules. Now researchers from the Universities of Miami and California say that a slight pressure can help functionalize graphene.

It has been shown before that Graphene can participate in Diels-Alder reactions either as the diene or the dienophile, and it is well known that pressure accelerates this reaction. These researchers used polymer tips (80 nm wide), coated them with inks that are Diels-Alder reactants, and applied a gentle force to push the tips into a graphene sheet (the tips were mounted on an atomic force microscope). This created 20 µm by 40 µm patches of graphene decorated with patterns of dye dots.

American Graphite Technologies (AGT) announced that Cheap Tubes received independent test results for its hybrid bucky/graphene paper formulations and advanced coating technology, and these results confirmed that the materials are conductive, stable and processable on an industrial scale.

Cheap Tubes produced several pre-production quality, highly conductive, flexible and mechanically stable self-supporting membrane samples (made form CNTs and GNPs), refined from mined graphite and other nano components. Cheap Tubes' hybrid paper has a surface area of 116m²/g at 100um thickness, and the company says that it could potentially produce it in sizes up to 36" wide, at speeds up to 50-100 feet of membrane per minute.

Cambridge University's Graphene Centre (CGC) and Plastic Logic have signed a research collaboration agreement on graphene in flexible plastic electronics. Plastic Logic donated large scale deposition equipment to the CGC to support graphene development.

A flexible tiled 42" OTFT e-paper display, made by Plastic Logic

The co-research currently has three main activities:

• To develop graphene as a transparent, highly conductive layer for plastic backplanes for unbreakable LCD and flexible OLED displays.
• To develop new transistor structures that use graphene-like materials as the active layer.
• To explot the commercialization of graphene for flexible electronics.

The CGC was established in early 2013 with a £12 million grant from the UK government.

Researchers from MIT are developing a new solar cell made from graphene and molybdenum disulfide. They hope to achieve the "ultimate power conversion possible". These panels will be thin, light and efficient - in fact the researchers claim that for the same weight, the new panels will be up to a 1,000 times more efficient than silicon based panels.

A solar cell made from a single graphene sheet and a single molybdenum disulfide sheet will achieve about 1% to 2% efficiency. Silicon based cells achieve 15%-20%, but the researchers believe that stacking several layers together will boost the efficiency dramatically. The two layers together are just 1 nm thick, while silicon cells are hundreds of thousands times thicker.

Powerbooster Technology (based in Shanghai) developed a graphene-based flexible touch-panels for mobile devices. The company says that graphene is cheaper and stronger than ITO (traditionally used for touch panels). The company plans to invest $150 million in the next three years in order to bring their solutions to the market.

Powerbooster is partnering with Bluestone Global Tech to supply them with graphene. They say they already started to produce these touch panels - in fact they claim that they already sell around 2 million touch panels per month, apparently to mid-sized Chinese smartphone makers (this is rather surprising, hopefully we'll learn more soon). They aim to get the first products with their graphene touch screens in the market by the end of 2013.

Haydale announced that it has developed new metal-free graphene-based inks. The HDPlas Graphene Ink Sc213 can be used to commercialize smart packaging, printed batteries, sensors, flexible displays (OLEDs and e-paper) and touch screens.

Haydale developed the new inks in collaboration with specialist ink manufacturer Gwent Electronic Materials (GEM). Those inks have been optimized for ideal viscosity and solid contents ensuring excellent coverage and exceptional conductivity. The inks are fully customisable and can be modified with development partners for specific requirements.