Directa Plus, a producer and supplier of graphene-based products for use in consumer and industrial markets, has announced it has received a further order from Alfredo Grassi. Over a year ago, in June 2017, Directa Plus and Grassi teamed up to develop graphene-enhanced clothing, workwear, uniforms and other textile products.

This follow-up order is worth an initial €0.70 million to supply high performance technical textiles with Graphene Plus (G+). It is anticipated that this order will be delivered in the current financial year. The Board believes this order represents the largest amount of textile material to be treated with graphene nanoplatelets by any company in the world to date.

NanoXplore, manufacturer and supplier of high-volume graphene powder for use in industrial markets, has announced that it acquired Sigma Industries in a deal that included cash and stock components. The cash component is approximately CAD$9 million (around $6.8 million USD) and the stock value is approximately CAD$9.8 million (almost $7.5 million USD).

Sigma Industries is a manufacturing company specializing in the manufacture of composite products, with two operating subsidiaries and 275 employees. It operates in the markets for heavy trucks, buses, public transit, machinery and wind energy. Sigma sells its products to original equipment manufacturers and distributors in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed new theories regarding the compression of water under a high-gradient electric field. They found that a high electric field applied to a tiny hole in a graphene membrane would compress the water molecules travelling through the pore by 3%. The predicted water compression may eventually prove useful in high-precision filtering of biomolecules for biomedical research.

The team commented: "This is an unexpected phenomenon, contrary to what we thought we knew about nanopore transport. It took three years to work out what it was the simulations were showing us. After exploring many potential solutions, the breakthrough came when we realized that we should not assume water is incompressible. Now that we understand what's happening in the computer simulations, we are able to reproduce this phenomenon in theoretical calculations."

Versarien, the advanced materials engineering group, has provided an update on its activities in relation to graphene-enhanced power storage devices like batteries and supercapacitors. The primary goal of incorporating graphene into these devices, Versarien says, is to significantly increase power storage capacity and reduce charging times.

Versarien has been working with WMG (Warwick Manufacturing Group) and their partner companies and scientists at the universities of Warwick and Cambridge to collaborate on the production of power storage devices such as batteries and supercapacitors using Versarien's proprietary Nanene graphene nano platelets. Significant advances have been made through incorporating the Company's high quality graphene into these devices and the Company looks forward to commercial products becoming available in due course.

Australian advanced materials technology company, Talga Resources, has announced an oversubscribed institutional placement that raised proceeds of approximately $8.5 million AUD (around $6.3 million USD). The oversubscribed placement was undertaken following in-bound interest from several new, high-quality institutional investors, in turn strengthening the Company’s share register.

The Company plans to apply the Placement proceeds towards further business growth and development including: Li-ion battery graphite and graphene product development (and scale up of battery anode commercial samples towards product marketing/offtake agreements), graphite resource to reserve conversion and advanced feasibility studies, cobalt project development including drilling and establishment of maiden JORC resources, exploration, metallurgy and preparation for potential cobalt IPO, general working capital and business development.

Computers based on fluids instead of silicon is not a new concept, and now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have shown how computational logic operations could be performed in a liquid medium by simulating the trapping of ions (charged atoms) in graphene floating in saline solution. The scheme might also be used in applications such as water filtration, energy storage or sensor technology.

NIST's ion-based transistor and logic operations are simpler in concept than earlier proposals. The new simulations show that a special film immersed in liquid can act like a solid silicon-based semiconductor. For example, the material can act like a transistor, the switch that carries out digital logic operations in a computer. The film can be switched on and off by tuning voltage levels like those induced by salt concentrations in biological systems.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, have developed a graphene assembled film that has over 60% higher thermal conductivity than graphite film despite the fact that graphite consists of many layers of graphene. The graphene film shows great potential as a novel heat spreading material for form-factor driven electronics and other high power-driven systems. The IP of the high-quality manufacturing process for the graphene film belongs to SHT Smart High Tech AB, a spin-off company from Chalmers, which is going to focus on the commercialization of the technology.

Until now, many scientists in the graphene research community have assumed that graphene assembled film cannot have higher thermal conductivity than graphite film. Single layer graphene has a thermal conductivity between 3500 and 5000 W/mK. If you put several graphene layers together, then it theoretically becomes graphite.