April 2015

Graphene-info is currently working on its "graphene for the battery market" report, which will provide a comprehensive and in-depth look at graphene's possibilities in battery applications, the current graphene battery market, different battery uses and functions, currently used technologies and a detailed survey of the roles graphene may take in enhancing or altogether changing known battery paradigms.

An important part of the report will detail the companies that make-up the market and have ongoing graphene battery projects and/or R&D activities. It will include a review of the scope of their work in the field, recent developments and contact details. Despite our deep understanding of the market and good ties to the industry, we'd still like to extend a call to all related companies that wish to be included in this report to contact us and update us on their latest graphene battery projects, at no cost on your end. We believe that being included in this report is a good way of exposing your work to a greater audience and is beneficial for both the company and the industry as a whole.

A new initiative was announced in the framework of the NOVUM Festival in Barcelona: Barcelona Graphene Accelerator (BGA), which intends to accelerate graphene and 2D-material based technologies in their path to market. 

The BGA's first phase will focus on the acceleration of photonic technologies, and therefore will be led by ICFO. The initiative will be dedicated to the development and eventual commercialization of devices based on graphene and graphene materials for applications in the fields of optoelectronics, nanoelectronics, robotics, security, sensors, devices for smart-cities, biotech and health, and Wearables, among others.

EPL Composite Solutions, a subsidiary of Haydale, announced the  development of an in-house testing facility to measure and demonstrate the durability of a new generation of graphene enhanced composite gas pipes and pipeline materials. The testing facility is meant to help the company accelerate the long term testing of thermoplastic composite pipes, as well as enabling it to fast track new materials such as graphene enhanced thermoplastics into the composite pipelines.

EPL has been working closely with the oil and gas industry on the development of a process to manufacture spoolable, high pressure, fiber reinforced thermoplastic composite pipes on a continuous basis. This product is planned to become a replacement for corrosion resistant steel pipes currently in widespread use. EPL is also working closely with Haydale to incorporate graphene into the thermoplastic composite pipes in order to enhance the oil and gas permeation resistance of these materials as well as increasing the materials' long term durability.

Vittoria Industries recently declared plans to launch a full range of graphene-enhanced road race and MTB tires around next September. The company also won the IDTechEx printed electronics europe 2015 award for "best commercialization", for using graphene in their bicycle wheels and tires. The company used pure and high grade graphene of 3 to 7 layers from Directa Plus.

The Vittoria Group president and founder stated that the company was successful with both existing products, as the carbon wheels show a dramatic improvement of heat dissipation and significant increased material strength and the tires have a much lower rolling resistance whilst improving grip and traction. He says sales are increasing around the world and some are even used as service wheels in the big professional bike races.

Saint Jean Carbon is a publicly traded junior mining exploration company with graphite mining claims on five properties located in Canada. It has recently signed an initial Letter of Intent (LOI) with Graphenea to act as the distributor of a wide range of graphene products marketed to customers across the Canadian market.

Saint Jean Carbon's goal in working with Graphenea is to leverage its direct experience and contacts within the carbon and graphite sectors to expand its presence in the emerging graphene marketplace. The company has stated its interest in developing several graphene applications, like new compounds in energy storage and collection, bioelectric sensory devices used in DNA sequencing, nanoporous membranes used in desalination plants and high-strength light-weight carbon fibres in aerospace applications.

Scientists at Columbia University made use of graphene and boron nitride to create a suitable environment in which to study other 2D semiconductors: Two layers of boron nitride are used to keep the environment away from the material under test, while graphene provides electrical connections. 

This method may be suitable for testing all 2D materials. The combination of BN and graphene electrodes cam be compared to a socket into which it is possible to place many other materials and study them in an extremely clean environment to understand their true properties and potential.

Researchers at Northwestern University developed a solution-based graphene ink that can be 3D-printed under ambient conditions via simple extrusion into arbitrarily shaped, electrically conductive, mechanically resilient and biocompatible scaffolds with filaments ranging in diameter from 100 to 1000 µm. The resulting material is very flexible, can be easily printed into small or large scale (multiple centimeters) objects, and may hold the potential for printing electronics as well as body parts.

The printed objects contain a high level of graphene while maintaining structural integrity, which is enabled by the particular biocompatible elastomer binder PLG that was chosen in combination with the solvent system. This could be a revolutionary method for producing biomaterials for nervous tissue regeneration, and also biomaterials that are scalable and not very expensive to produce since these novel 3D printable graphene inks are relatively easy to produce, can be rapidly fabricated into an infinite variety of forms (including patient specific implants), and are also surgically friendly (can be adjusted to size and sutured to surrounding tissue).

Researchers at the University of Guangzhou, China, managed to improve the capacitance of supercapacitors by nearly 1000-fold compared with that of the laminated or wrinkled CVD graphene-film-based supercapacitors. To achieve this, the researchers integrated transparency into freestanding, flexible graphene paper (FFT-GP). These supercapacitors's capacitance is also about ten times better than previously reported values for transparent and flexible supercapacitors based on pure carbon materials. However, some carbon-based nontransparent supercapacitors still perform better than the FFT-GP-based transparent supercapacitor. 

The improved performance is mainly based on the prism-like graphene building blocks that the FFT-GP is made of. The hollow structures of the graphene that give the material its transparency also provide additional space for chemical reactions to occur compared to other materials. Also, the aligned and interconnected prism-like structures provide a wide open path for ions and electrons to travel along and the good charge transport leads to an overall better performance.

The Italian Directs Plus announced receiving a grant of €5.5 million to finance the company. The company, which has been around for ten years and recently finalized a pre-IPO financing, declared that it is no longer a start-up but a technology company that aims to speed up development and continue international growth.

Researchers at the UC San Diego invented a graphene-based way of fabricating nanostructures that contain well-defined, atomic-sized gaps. Such structures could be used to detect single molecules associated with certain diseases and may lay the foundation for miniature microprocessors.

The ability to create these nanogaps is highly desirable in fabricating nanoscale structures, which are typically used as components in optic and electronic devices. By decreasing the spacing between electronic circuits on a microchip, for example, one can fit more circuits on the same chip to produce a device with enhanced computing power. The scientists managed to create nanogaps between two nanostructures, that are much smaller than previously ones by using a graphene spacer, which can be etched away to create the gap.