Graphene CVD sheets - updates and market status - Page 20

Grafoid has signed a joint intellectual property development agreement with CVD Equipment Corporation to develop graphene based "NanoToMacro catalyst materials". Grafoid will provide expertise to develop unique intellectual properties including the identification and feasibility for creating new combinations of graphene with carbon nanotubes as a catalyst material.

Both companies have equal rights to share in jointly created IPs and the ability to further the JV on additional terms. The current agreement runs for one year but it's renewable.

Researchers from NIST have been using combined optical techniques (internal photoemission or IPE and spectroscopic ellipsometry, or SE) to determine graphene's work function and the band alignment of a graphene-insulator-semiconductor structure.

IPE is used to measure the energy of electrons emitted from materials in order to determine binding energies, while in SE, broadband light sources are shone upon a material, and optical properties are ascertained from the reflectivity.

Graphenea says that they have finished the expansion works in their labs, and their production capacity has been increased X3 times. The company installed CVD growth and transfer equipment including an Aixtron BM Pro CVD system. The labs now have characterization facilities like Raman, SEM, FEI Titan TEM and AFM.

Graphenea's labs are based in the Nanotecnology Center CIC nanoGUNE in San Sebastian, Spain.

Researchers discovered that Graphene could provide the world's thinnest metal coating to protect against corrosion. They tested two types of graphene coating: one that is directly made on copper or nickel, and the second was transferred onto another metal. They both provided protection against corrosion. The graphene provides the same corrosion protection as conventional organic coating that is more than five times thicker.

In the first experiment it was discovered that if you use CVD to grow a single layer of graphene on copper it slowed the corrosion - in fact the coated copper corroded seven times slower than bare copper. In a second experiment, Nickel was coated with multiple layers of graphene and it corroded 20 times slower than bare nickel.

Aixtron announced that the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Pisa, Italy, has ordered two BM Pro systems in a 4-inch wafer configuration. IIT Pisa researchers will use these systems for the development and production of graphene for the implementation of novel hydrogen storage systems. BM Pro is the new product name for Aixtron's Black Magic system.

TIT Pisa will use one system to deposit graphene using both chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The second BM Pro system is configured for high temperature (1800°C) processing with graphene to be formed using sublimation. Both systems have already been installed and commissioned.

CVD Equipment announced a new material platform called CVD3DGraphene - chemical vapor deposited 3D graphene products. The platform is based on a graphene-foam like material that is comprised from several 2D graphene sheets that are mechanically and electrically fully interconnected in three dimensions.

CVD says that CVD3DGraphene is a highly customizable material platform that enables the preservation of many of the high performance material properties of the traditional one atom thick two dimensional graphene sheets. Such three dimensional graphene materials can be further functionalized by chemical vapor deposition, electro deposition and/or chemical grafting to develop even more advanced materials for high performance product developments.

Researchers (from University of California, Riverside) suggest a new simple method to count graphene sheets. Usually, when graphene is made by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) it results in multiple layers of sheets, and some defects and wrinkles. Current techniques to count the sheets (such as Raman and atomic force microscopy) are limited in size and need calibration.

The new method exploits the fact that graphene quenches fluorescence. The idea is to coat an area of graphene on a surface with a fluorescent polymer dye to allow visualization with a simple fluorescence microscope. The data processing is then quite straightforward.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Metal Research developed a way to turn graphene into porous three-dimensional 'foam' using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). This 'foam' has extremely high conductivity and when permeated with a siloxane-based polymer it results in a composite that can be twisted, stretched and bent without harming its electrical or mechanical properties.

This foam has a unique network structure, large surface area, very low density and outstanding electrical and mechanical properties. This can find uses in many fields- flexible electronics, fuel cell electrodes, biomedical supports and more.

CVD Equipment Corporation and Graphene Laboratories are new offering new CVD Graphene research materials and customization services for transparent and conductive CVD grown Graphene films. The companies also offer transfer services onto a wide variety of substrates such as insulating silicon dioxide, plastic, and glass. These services will be offered on

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania developed a new cost-effective method to make Graphene. The new method is said to be scalable for commercialization as it uses readily available materials and manufacturing processes at ambient pressures. The researchers report that the Graphene sheet was one atom thick in 95% of its area.

The team used chemical vapor deposition (CVD) but used smooth copper foil instead of costly custom copper sheets. The team 'electropolished' the foil and this was smooth enough to produce single-layer graphene (in 95% of the area).