January 2019

Elecjet, developer of USB C PD and Graphene Battery technology for fast charging, will be launching a Kickstarter campaign on February 13th, for its Apollo Traveler: an advanced graphene-enhanced USB-C / A fast charging power bank.

The company explained that the Apollo Traveler uses graphene layers to cover the negative pole and positive pole to achieve a smaller internal resistance and better conductivity. Elecjet also stated that it "reinforced graphene composite layers inside the power bank, making overheating issues a thing of the past". The graphene for the battery is provided by CellsX.

A team of European researchers from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology and Uppsala University in Sweden, along with scientists from RWTH Aachen University and AMO GmbH in Germany, has discovered that when graphene is integrated with the metal of a circuit, contact resistance is not impaired by humidity. This finding may help to develop new sensors with a significant cost reduction.

To achieve efficient sensors, graphene needs to make good electrical contacts when integrated with a conventional electronic circuit. Such proper contacts are crucial in any sensor and significantly affect its performance. But a common problem is that graphene is sensitive to humidity, to the water molecules in the surrounding air that are adsorbed onto its surface. The H₂O molecules change the electrical resistance of the graphene material, which introduces a false signal into the sensor.

Researchers from Italy's ISOF-CNR, University of Naples "Federico II" and Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia have developed new organic n-type FET transistors (OFETs) based on CVD graphene sheets. The researchers say that the new process and materials they used can enable flexible, transparent and short-channel OFETs - which could be used in the future for OLED or OLET (organic light emitting transistor) displays.

To create the new transistors, the researchers used thermally evaporated thin-films of PDIF-CN2 (a perylene diimide derivative) as the the organic semiconductor for the active channel of the transistor with the single-layer CVD graphene (grown at Italy's IIT institute) as the electrode material. The final device architectures have been fabricated via Electron-Beam-Lithography (EBL) and Reactive Ion Etching (RIE).

A team of researchers led by Columbia University have developed a new method to finely tune adjacent layers of graphene, in a research that provides new insights into the physics underlying the material's intriguing characteristics.

"Our work demonstrates new ways to induce superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene, in particular, achieved by applying pressure," said Cory Dean, assistant professor of physics at Columbia and the study's principal investigator. "It also provides critical first confirmation of last year's MIT results - that bilayer graphene can exhibit electronic properties when twisted at an angle - and furthers our understanding of the system, which is extremely important for this new field of research".

Researchers from Northwestern University have turned graphene oxide (GO) into a soft, moldable and kneadable "play dough" that can be shaped and reshaped into free-standing, three-dimensional structures.

Called GO dough, this malleable material is said to solve several long-standing problems in the graphene manufacturing industry. Currently graphene oxide is stored as dry solids or powders, which are prone to combustion and explosion, said Jiaxing Huang, who led the study. Or they have to be turned into dilute dispersions, which multiply the material’s mass by hundreds or thousands.

Saint Jean Carbon has announced that it is developing a new form of graphene battery technology and will start building the first prototype of its graphene gel salt water batteries. Batteries based on this technology should charge faster, run longer and theoretically may last indefinitely. The project’s long term goal is to have a series of three full production batteries ready for launch in spring 2020.

Saint Jean Carbon stated that salt water battery technology has been in research for about 5 years. Continued advancement slowed due to limited voltage capacity in comparison with Lithium batteries. Now with the use of graphene in a highly concentrated salt water gel, graphene can now be used without worrying about the graphene re-stacking, which would reduce the intercalation rate. Salt water batteries are much safer, won’t burn and have significantly less raw material cost.

Researchers have fully characterized graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) with a clear route towards upscaling the production. Two-dimensional sheets of graphene in the form of ribbons a few tens of nanometers across have unique properties that are highly interesting for use in future electronics.

The nanoribbons were grown on a template made of silicon carbide under well controlled conditions and thoroughly characterized by a research team from MAX IV Laboratory, Techniche Universität Chemnitz, Leibniz Universität Hannover, and Linköping University. The template has ridges running in two different crystallographic directions to let both the armchair and zig-zag varieties of graphene nanoribbons form. The result is a predictable growth of high-quality graphene nanoribbons which have a homogeneity over a millimeter scale and a well-controlled edge structure.

This is a sponsored post by Graphenea

Graphenea recently launched a graphene foundry service GFAB. The company will manufacture custom circuit designs on graphene wafers up to 6. The service is aimed at enabling fast device prototyping and accelerating development of new applications, lowering entry barriers to graphene-based solutions.

Graphenea states that in view of the market demands, the offer now includes small batch sizes (1-3 wafers). Lithography masks can be manufactured by Graphenea or provided by the customer. GFAB includes graphene growth, transfer on 4 and 6 wafers, metal contact deposition and lift-off, and graphene lithography with etching.

Nanomedical Diagnostics, a leading manufacturer of graphene biosensors, has announced its corporate name change to Cardea.

The new name aims to reflect a significant expansion of the company's commercial activities, from primarily serving the pharmaceutical industry with ultra sensitive biosensor research tools, to opening its breakthrough biosensor platform for a broad set of healthcare and life science partners.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have shown that graphene exhibits very different properties in humid conditions. Their study shows that in bi-layer graphene, water seeps between the layers in a humid environment. The properties of graphene significantly depend on how these carbon layers interact with each other and when water enters in between it can modify the interaction. The results of this study could impact how graphene can be used in real-life applications.

The researchers found the water forms an atomically thin layer at 22% relative humidity and separates graphene layers at over 50% relative humidity. This suggests that layered graphene could exhibit very different properties in a humid place, compared to a dry place.