Membranes - Page 13

A scientist from the American Washington University, by the name of John D. Fortner (PhD), received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The five-year, $500,000 award is for his project titled Development and Application of Crumpled Graphene Oxide-Based Nanocomposites as a Platform Material for Advanced Water Treatment.

Fortner will aim to develop 3D nanoscale composites made of crumpled graphene oxide as multifunctional platform materials for advanced water treatment technologies. Along with material synthesis and characterization, he plans to develop a range of membrane assemblies for advanced water treatment, including crumpled graphene oxide nanocomposites, which are highly water-permeable, photoreactive and antimicrobial. There is a patent pending for this platform technology.

The University of Manchester's Graphene Department created a series of new videos that show the uses of Graphene, with an emphasis placed on graphene membranes. This is the first of the series, with more to come.

The UK based Perpetuus Carbon, producer and global supplier of high quality functionalized graphene, signed a preliminary agreement to achieve full commercial partnership and manufacturing agreement with G24 Power, a leading dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) company from the UK.

Perpetuus is to provide functionalized graphene, in sheet or roll form, for G24’s production of a range of advanced graphene-enabled components. G24 reportedly has manufacturing capabilities of thousands of metres of components per month for use in areas like resistance heating, biosensor platforms, barrier packaging, composite physical reinforcements, water treatment, fuel cell membranes, thermal management and heat dissipation, EMI shielding, electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors and LI-AIR battery cathodes.

Ionic Industries, formerly known as Grafitech, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Australian Strategic Energy Resources. Ionic Industries is working together with Monash University to develop a way to sustainably manufacture graphene from natural graphite and graphene-based nanofiltration membranes.

The company has announced the purchase of a membrane casting facility for its graphene membrane technology, with an intention to develop scalable graphene membranes with multiple uses for mining and food processing.

Graphene Nanochem PLC, the performance chemicals and advanced materials company that is malaysian based and traded in the AIM of the London Stock Exchange, has recently entered into an agreement with the Singapore-based HWV which designs, develops and builds water treatment systems.

The two companies agreed to collaborate in order to design and commercialize the PlatClean V1 System, a graphene-enhanced water treatment system for the oil and gas industry. 

Researchers from Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have come up with a simple process for producing nanopores (about 2 nanometers in diameter) in a graphene membrane using the photothermal properties of gold nanorods.

The researchers aim to use this discovery to construct a direct DNA sequencing process, which will be simultaneously electrical and optical. This should facilitate a faster sequencing procedure, as traditional methods in which DNA components are sorted by an electrical current passing through nanopores on a silicon chip tend to get congested and slow, as information flowing through thousands of nanopores needs to be handled. Adding an optical component should, according to the researchers, help eliminate bottlenecks and speed up the sequencing process.

Researchers at the University of Manchester developed a new coating made from graphene-oxide that can be used to enable ultra-strong non-corrosive coating paints, hermetic food packaging and even a good substrate for flexible electronics.

The researchers developed the graphene-oxide coating by taking graphene-oxide and treating it with a "simple chemical treatment". The resulting film behaves like graphite in terms of chemical and thermal stability but becomes mechanically nearly as tough as graphene.

Researchers from TU Delft developed very small graphene membranes (or "drums") that can be used to detect extremely small changes in position and forces. These tiny drums have find applications as sensors, and may also be used as memory chips in a quantum computer.

The researchers refer to these membranes as tiny drums, and they actually demonstrated how you can use microwave-frequency light to play on those drums. The membranes acts as a mirror in an optomechanical cavity. The microwave photos were shot on the drums which acts like a mirror. The researchers were able to sense minute changes in the position of the graphene sheet - even a change of 17 femtometers, nearly 1/10000th of the diameter of an atom.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $880,000 grant for a University of Pennsylvania 2-year project that aims to develop fast and cost-effective genome sequencing. The project uses the DNA translocation process which threads DNA through nanopoers in a thin membrane - in this case a graphene nanoribbon (GNR) membrane.

A GNR is very useful for sequencing because it's thin and strong, and also its electrical properties enable to read the bases signals directly from the membrane as the DNA passes through the pore. We posted about this project last year, and it's great to see them receive more funding.

Last month Australia's Strategic Energy Resources (SER) announced that it will focus on graphene-related investments, disclosing that it has an alliance with Monash University and an exclusive license agreement on the energy storage graphene technologies.

Today it was announced that SER and Monash University have been awarded a second ARC Linkage Grant for graphene-based research. The three-year project will cost $375,000 (probably AUD, which translates to $350,000 USD). The ARC will fund $255,000 and the rest will be funded by SER. The project (titled Green Manufacturing of Graphene from Indigenous Natural Graphite and Graphene-based Nanofiltration Membranes) aims to establish a green chemical route for transforming graphites fines into graphene.