Graphene Coating: introduction and market status - Page 26

Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute got a $1 Million grant for a three-year study on a new coating (based on Graphene) for nanosensors that can be used for Oil or Gas exploration. The grant was given by the Advanced Energy Consortium.

Koratkar and colleagues are investigating how the flow of water, steam, or certain gasses over surfaces coated with carbon nanotubes or graphene can generate small amounts of electricity. The researchers seek to explain this phenomenon — which has been observed but is not yet fully understood — and use their findings to create tiny self-powered devices that travel through naturally occurring cracks deep in the earth and can help uncover hidden pockets of oil and natural gas.

Nanotek Instruments, parent company of Angstron Materials, has been issued a US Patent for its development of a new high-performing class of meso-porous nanocomposites.  The new nanocomposite provides a superior supercapacitor electrode material for uses that include hybrid electric vehicles (EVs), transportation and energy storage. The technology is based on the company’s breakthrough discovery of nano graphene platelets (NGPs). Angstron, the world leader in production of NGPs, will make the nanocomposite material.

Angstron will provide the meso-porous NGP nanocomposites in two forms: NGPs coated with a thin layer of conducting polymer or surface functional groups and NGPs bonded by a conductive binder, coating, or matrix material such as a polymeric carbon. The platelets in these products are comprised of a sheet of graphite plane or multiple sheets of graphite plane with a thickness less than 10 nm and an average length, width, or diameter smaller than 500 nm. The binder or matrix material bonded to the platelets to form the nanocomposite material create a surface area greater than 500 m.sup.2/gm.

Graphane has the same honeycomb structure as graphene, except that it is "spray-painted" with hydrogen atoms that attach themselves to the carbon. The resulting bonds between the hydrogen and carbon atoms effectively tie down the electrons that make graphene so conducting. Yet Graphane retains the thinness, super-strength, flexibility and density of its older chemical cousin.

One advantage of graphane is that it could actually become easier to make the tiny strips of graphene needed for electronic circuits. Such structures are currently made rather crudely by taking a sheet of the material and effectively burning away everything except the bit you need. But now such strips could be made by simply coating the whole of a graphene sheet except for the strip itself - with hydrogen. The narrow bit left free of hydrogen is your conducting graphene strip, surrounded by a much bigger graphane area that electrons cannot go down.

As if this is not enough, the physicist group in Manchester that discovered Graphane have found that by gradually binding hydrogen to graphene they are able to drive the process of transforming a conducting material into an insulating one and watch what happens in between.