Directa Plus has announced that Setcar SA, its environmental services subsidiary, has signed a three-year contract with Liberty Galati, the largest integrated steel producer in Romania, to process oily mills sludge.

The contract will last for three years and has a total value of €5.5 million, with the potential for further expansion up to a total of €8.0 million. Under the terms of the agreement, Setcar will provide solutions for the treatment of oily mills scale produced in the manufacturing of steel.

Directa said the contract would enable Setcar to expand further its waste treatment and disposal services for industrial pollutants and broaden the range of applications for the group’s Grafysorber technology. By using Grafysorber, Setcar would allow Liberty Galati to recycle a considerable amount of oily sludge waste, transforming it into a raw material suitable for reuse in steel production.

Graphmatech and Khalifa University of Science and Technology’s Research and Innovation Center for Graphene and 2D Materials (RIC2D) have announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU), establishing a strategic framework for cooperation in advanced graphene-engineered materials and manufacturing processes.

A spin-off from Sweden’s Uppsala University, Graphmatech develops novel graphene-based nanocomposite materials and products, and focuses on three main business areas: metal-graphene composites and coated powders, polymer-graphene composites and additives for energy storage.

Earlier this year, Universal Matter acquired Applied Graphene Materials' assets for $1.3 million and then AGM changed its company name to Universal Matter GBR. Now, Universal Matter received support from The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) Carbon Ore Processing Program through a cooperative agreement. 

The company has demonstrated a novel graphene production technology called Flash Joule Heating (FJH), which can transform carbonaceous material feedstocks, including coal and coal-wastes, to high quality graphene.

Researchers from Singapore's National University of Singapore (NUS) and Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) have formulated 'golden rules' for controlling the alignment of supermoiré lattices. 

Moiré patterns are formed when two identical periodic structures are overlaid with a relative twist angle between them or two different periodic structures but overlaid with or without twist angle. The twist angle is the angle between the crystallographic orientations of the two structures. For example, when graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) which are layered materials are overlaid on each other, the atoms in the two structures do not line up perfectly, creating a pattern of interference fringes, called a moiré pattern. This results in an electronic reconstruction. The moiré pattern in graphene and hBN has been used to create new structures with exotic properties, such as topological currents and Hofstadter butterfly states. When two moiré patterns are stacked together, a new structure called supermoiré lattice is created. Compared with the traditional single moiré materials, this supermoiré lattice expands the range of tunable material properties allowing for potential use in a much larger variety of applications.

First Graphene has announced an R&D collaboration with Greatcell Energy, trading as Halocell Energy, and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to commercialize perovskite solar cell fabrication. The project has received a Cooperative Research Centers Project (CRC-P) grant worth over AUD$2 million (around $USD1,300,000).

The research and development project is intended to commercialize ultra-low-cost, flexible perovskite solar cell fabrication using Halocell’s roll-to-roll production process at the company’s Wagga Wagga plant, First Graphene said in an announcement. Through the project, First Graphene plans to develop cost-effective graphene-based electrode replacements for high-cost conductor materials, such as gold and silver, used in cell manufacturing.

NanoXplore and its wholly owned subsidiary, VoltaXplore, a silicon-graphene-enhanced Li-ion battery manufacturer for the Electric Vehicle and grid storage markets, have announced that VoltaXplore has agreed on commercial terms for the supply of Li-ion battery cells with a well-known commercial vehicle OEM. 

The batteries include graphene in the anode (graphene-silicon additives) and battery cells will reportedly be produced in VoltaXplore’s gigafactory starting from 2026. The agreement is for 1 GWh per year for a duration of 10 years following a pricing formula that passes through raw material cost to the customer.

Researchers from Vienna University of Technology and Budapest University of Technology and Economics have developed a comprehensive computer model of realistic graphene structures, to tackle the question of how stable graphene's properties are -  will they be destroyed by disturbances and additional effects, which are unavoidable in practice, or will they remain intact?

The scientists found that the desired effects are very stable. Even graphene pieces that are not quite perfect can be used well for technological applications. "We calculate on an atomic scale how electric current propagates in a tiny piece of graphene," says Prof. Florian Libisch from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at TU Wien. "There are different ways an electron can move through the material. According to the rules of quantum physics, it doesn't have to choose one of these paths; the electron can take several paths at the same time."

Researchers from the University of Surrey have developed a new thermo-active road solution that could help prevent potholes caused by freezing and thawing in the winter. A new project that will test this new approach has been awarded a £800,000 research fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering. The outcomes could improve how major roads across the United Kingdom are maintained and upgraded, even as climate change increases the challenge of keeping them fit for purpose.  

As part of this five-year research project, the Surrey team will work with advanced materials engineering company Versarien to develop a new graphene-enhanced microcapsule to dig into the soil beneath the surface when roads are resurfaced to improve heat conduction and storage.