February 2018

Haydale will be demonstrating real-life applications of its lightweight graphene-enhanced prepregs at JEC World. Graphene-enhanced prepreg offers significant weight reduction and improved structural performance. This is expected to be of considerable interest to the automotive, sports and leisure and tooling industries.

On display will be: graphene-enhanced carbon fiber composite rear wheel arch made with thermally enhanced tooling; demisable fuel tank for use in the satellite industry; next generation graphene-enhanced bicycle frame; graphene-enhanced payload sent to the edge of space. Also, other components will be displayed, like Haydale’s latest advancements in graphene enhanced 3D filament and pellets aimed at improving the speed, strength, quality and accuracy of 3D printed products.

The Graphene Pavilion at the GSMA Mobile World Congress has showcased two fascinating graphene-based photonics devices. The first is said to be the world's first all-graphene optical communication link operating at a data rate of 25 Gb/s per channel, and the second one, displayed at the Ericsson stand, is the first ultra-fast graphene-based photonic switch in an Ericsson testbed. These graphene-based photonic devices may become the building blocks of the next generation of mobile networks.

"5G will all be about optical communications, and the realization of the ultra-fast optical communication link with graphene is a real breakthrough. It is very exciting that it is already on display at the Ericsson stand," said ICREA Professor Frank Koppens from ICFO (The Institute of Photonic Sciences), Barcelona, the Scientific Chair of the Graphene Pavilion.

Advanced materials group Versarien has signed an agreement with shoemaker Vivobarefoot to collaborate on developing graphene-enhanced footwear.

Vivobarefoot is a leading maker of minimalist shoes, majority owned by Galahad and Asher Clark, with Taiwanese shoe manufacturer Stella International owning a minority stake, Versarien said.

The Department of Energy (DoE) has selected six projects that seek to make carbon capture technology more affordable and reliable for use in coal-fired power plants to receive $17.3 million in federal funding. Among the project is one graphene project.

The Institute of Gas and Technology has been awarded $2.9 million to develop a transformational graphene oxide-based membrane process for post-combustion carbon capture. The project has also secured $750,052 in non-federal funding.

Rice University scientists, led by Prof. James Tour, along with teams from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China have detected a deception in graphene catalysts that, until now, gone unnoticed. Graphene has been widely tested as a replacement for expensive platinum in applications like fuel cells, where the material catalyzes the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) essential to turn chemical energy into electrical energy.

Since graphene isn't naturally metallic, researchers have been baffled by its catalytic activity when used as a cathode. The Rice team has now discovered that trace quantities of manganese contamination from graphite precursors or reactants hide in the graphene lattice. Under the right conditions, those metal bits activate the ORR. Tour said they also provide insight into how ultrathin catalysts like graphene can be improved.

In November 2017, First Graphene announced the official opening of its Commercial Graphene Facility (CGF). Now, the Company shared what it views as a significant milestone, "not just for the Company but also for the global graphene industry" - the commencement of production from its CGF at Henderson, Western Australia.

The facility has been reportedly constructed for less than the $1m budget previously advised. The Company has also installed a laboratory to perform constant quality assurance and control procedures. Having purchased its own Raman spectrograph, FGR is able to complete various testing procedures on its own premises.

Researchers from the UCLA, Mississippi State University, University of Nevada and China's Central South have designed an efficient and long-lasting graphene-based electrode for supercapacitors. The device’s design was inspired by the structure and function of leaves on tree branches, and it is said to be more than 10 times more efficient than other designs.

The electrode design reportedly provides the same amount of energy storage, and delivers as much power as similar electrodes, despite being much smaller and lighter. In experiments it produced 30% better capacitance — a device’s ability to store an electric charge — for its mass compared to the best available electrode made from similar carbon materials, and 30 times better capacitance per area. It also produced 10 times more power than other designs and retained 95% of its initial capacitance after more than 10,000 charging cycles.

A team led by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay, India, has developed a graphene-enhanced inexpensive, flexible pressure sensor that can be used for various health-care applications. The piezoresistive pressure sensor can reportedly monitor even small-scale movements caused by low-pressure variations.

The sensor can measure blood pulse rate in real time when placed on the wrist and neck. The sensor was also tested for its ability to monitor respiration; When placed on the throat, the sensor could detect changes in pressure when different words were pronounced. Interestingly, the fabricated sensor also showed good sensitivity in detecting large-scale motion monitoring, as in the case of bending and extension of finger joints.

A research team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has placed armchair-edge graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) on a gold surface. Since AGNRs become semiconductors at certain widths, this structure may offer advantages in speed, heat dissipation and power consumption in electronic devices and create new research paths in spintronics.

The goal was to use AGNRs to block magnetic interactions on a metal. The team focused on how the AGNRs affect these interactions in a molecule tightly adhered to gold using the phenomenon of Kondo resonance — a well-defined, temperature-dependent effect between a single magnetic atom or molecule and a metal’s free electrons. For this purpose, the team relied on a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy tool at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus have created a graphene-based wearable device capable of sensing and understanding complex human motion. This could lead to a practical way to monitor and interpret human motion, in what may become the next generation of health monitors.

The sensor called the GNF-Pad was made by infusing graphene nanoflakes into a rubber-like adhesive pad. According to the team, the sensor’s durability was tested by stretching it to see if it could maintain accuracy under strains of up to 350%. The device went through more than 10,000 cycles of stretching and relaxing while maintaining its electrical stability.