Garmor announced a few days ago that it will begin to start producing graphene oxide flakes next month using its low-cost environmentally-friendly production process. Sean Christiansen, Garmor's VP of engineering has been kind enough to answer a few question regarding the company's business and technology.

Dr. Christiansen received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2001. Since then he worked in several companies, helping them to commercialize new innovations in high technology industries.

Last month we posted about Shanghai's Powerbooster Technology and their graphene-based flexible touch-panels for mobile devices. The company is using Bluestone Global Tech's graphene to produce those panels. BGT now posted a nice video showing these touch panels in action:

According to Powerbooster, they are already producing and selling around two million touch panels each month, apparently to mid-sized Chinese smartphone makers. The first products will reach the market by the end of 2013.

Researchers from Boston College and Japan's Nagoya University developed a new carbon material based on warped graphene sheets. The synthesized new material is made from 80 carbon atoms (in a network of 26 rings) and 30 hydrogen atoms on the edges. They call this new material "grossly warped nanographenes" and say that it has interesting optical and electronic properties.

Basically the idea is that they introduced defects into the graphene that distorted the material and also altered the properties. The new material is dramatically more soluble than a planar GNF, and it differs in color, too. Both materials are equally easily oxidized but the warped graphene is more difficult to reduce.;

Researchers from the Universities of Bath and Exeter have developed and demonstrated an optical switch made from graphene. this switch has an incredibly short optical response - nearly a hundred times quicker than current materials.

This fast response is in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which makes it useful for telecommunications, security and also medicine applications. Current optical switches have as response rate of a few picoseconds, and the few-layer-graphene switch's response rate is about one hundred femtoseconds.

Garmor, a new company spun-off from the University of Central Florida (UCF) a couple of months ago to commercialize a new low-cost environmentally-friendly graphene oxide production process, plan to start producing graphene oxide flakes next month (August 2013).

The Garmor facility will have the ability to produce 10 to 20 kg batches of graphene oxide flakes. The yearly capacity will be 100 metric tons. They will offer graphene dispersion in liquid, or dry powder. The company is focused on graphene as an additive for rubbers, plastics or metals - to enhance their strength while lowering the weight.

Researchers from Cornell University have shown that in bilayer graphene, defects can influence the conductivity. In fact, the bilayer graphene, when it is stacked and staggered, has ripples (called solitons) which act like electrical highways. The rest of the non-rippled bi-layer graphene is semiconducting.

Up until now it was predicted that bilayer graphene is uniformly semiconducting when stacked and staggered. The researchers say that ideally they'd like to get rid of those solitrons, or control their formation - to have one "electrical highway" but not so many. So controlling bilayer graphene solitrons may enable controlling graphene's electrical properties.

Researchers from Sweden's KTH (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) Royal Institute developed piezoresistive sensors based on graphene membranes. They say that graphene increases the sensitivity of these MEMS sensors by up to 100 times while reducing the thickness.

The researchers used a graphene sheet over a cavity etched into a silicon dioxide (SiO2) film on a silicon substrate. The graphene acts as the membrane. They fabricated a prototype device, in this case a strain gauge, although this technology can be used to make other MEMS based sensors.

Researchers from Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) developed a new way to synthesize CVD-grown 3D mesoporous graphene nanoballs (MGBs) for supercapacitor applications. The researchers say that these materials can be easily mass produced, while retaining graphene's properties.

The MGBs feature a large surface area and great conductivity. The researchers demonstrated that the capacity of supercapacitors can be improved significantly using these new materials, due to the unique mesoporous structure. This new material not only improves the capacity, but it also improves the properties of the supercapacitor (excellent capacitance even at a high current density) because the mesopores inside the graphene surfaces induce nanochannels to transport ions in electrolyte.

Researchers from the University of Vienna managed to assemble a new structure of high-quality metal silicides (nickel, cobalt and iron) coated with a graphene sheets. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), the researchers studied the electronic properties of this new material.

It was found that the graphene protects the silicides against oxidation, while barely interacting with the silicides themselves. The unique properties of the graphene are widely preserved. This means that this new composite material is a good way to incorporate graphene with existing metal silicide technology, which will hopefully enable the usage of graphene in applications such as semiconductor devices, spintronics, photovoltaics and thermoelectrics.

Grafoid announced today that they completed a new funding round from private investors, raising just over $3.5 million USD. Earlier in 2013 the company raised a further $1.5 million, which means the company raised over $5 million USD since the beginning of 2013.

The company says that this financing round brings them a step closer to the consruction of their MesoGraf production facilities. Mesograf is Grafoid's graphene-based material announced two months ago. Grafoid collaborates with the National University of Singapore (NUS) and their new spin-off company Graphite Zero on the production, development and marketing of this material.