Membranes - Page 6

water technology company G2O recently announced a £1.035 million investment in a round led by private equity firm Maven Capital Partners, and plans to sign collaborative partnerships with suppliers and enter global markets to expand customer reach.

Maven Capital Partners, one of the UK’s most active private equity firms, has led a £1.035 million investment in Manchester-headquartered water treatment technology business. A total of £600,000 has been provided by Maven funds, which includes a £400,000 investment from NPIF Maven Equity Finance, which is part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund and a £200,000 investment from the Finance Durham Fund, both managed by Maven. The additional £435,000 is from a number of private individual investors.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have conducted simulations suggesting that graphene can be modified with special pores to act as a tunable filter or strainer for ions in a liquid.

The concept could have applications like nanoscale mechanical sensors, drug delivery, water purification and sieves or pumps for ion mixtures similar to biological ion channels, which are critical to the function of living cells.

A joint collaboration of researchers from SCALE Nanotech, Graphenea and TU Delft have used graphene to make reflective-type displays that operate faster and at much higher resolution than existing technologies.

2500ppi GIMOD prototype showcased at the Mobile World Congress. Credit: Graphene Flagship

Displays consume the most power in electronic gadgets. Portable devices like smartphones and VR visors therefore require most of the energy from batteries. As an alternative solution, reflective-type displays (like those in e-book readers) consume much less power, though they cannot deliver video. Reflective displays that offer the specifications of standard technologies (OLED, LCD) do not exist yet, but graphene may open the door to such possibilities.

Grafoid and Stria Lithium have announced the successful co-development of an innovative graphene-based filtration membrane to separate Magnesium and Calcium from salars. Developed in concert with Grafoid Inc. a related company sharing common directors and an active partner in the 2GL Green Energy Technology Strategic Alliance this filtration membrane functions as a precursor that promotes efficiencies within the conventional process of recovering Lithium from Salts.

The Companies explain that the key method of recovering commercial lithium has remained the same for over half a century: by evaporating brines collected from salars and salt lakes in evaporation ponds. However, this method is time consuming and can take a year or more - leading to large amounts of salt waste. In addition, Magnesium and Calcium are also present and form impurities that must be refined out in the process. With the demand for lithium outpacing the recovery rate of lithium from brine faster and more efficient methods of recovery will be critical to supply the growing demand.

Researchers from the Foundation of Research and Technology-Hellas, Patras, Greece and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece have developed a technique for creating nanopores in CVD grown graphene. The technique is based on femtosecond (fs) laser treatment of graphene.

CVD graphene is placed onto Si/SiO₂ using conventional dry transferring techniques. Then, it is treated in air with 80 fs laser pulses at high repetition rate. By focusing the barrage of fs laser pulses onto the graphene, circular patterns are formed.

Researchers at MIT have found a way to directly pinprick microscopic holes into graphene as the material is grown in the lab. Using this technique, they have fabricated relatively large sheets of graphene (roughly the size of a postage stamp), with pores that could make filtering certain molecules out of solutions vastly more efficient.

Holes would typically be considered unwanted defects, but the MIT team has found that certain defects in graphene can be an advantage in fields such as dialysis. Typically, much thicker polymer membranes are used in laboratories to filter out specific molecules from solution, such as proteins, amino acids, chemicals, and salts. If it could be tailored with selectively-sized pores that let through certain molecules but not others, graphene could substantially improve separation membrane technology.

Clean TeQ and Ionic Industries have formed a Joint Venture to progress the commercialization of graphene-based water treatment technologies.

The Companies stated that move follows the last 18 months in which Clean TeQ and Ionic have undertaken an extensive program of work together with Monash University to develop, manufacture and apply graphene oxide membranes for water filtration applications.

Graphenea, in collaboration with industrial and academic partners (Infineon Technologies, WITec, RWTH Aachen University and Simune Atomistics), announced the successful completion of project NanoGraM that focused on nano/microelectromechanical (NEMS/MEMS) devices based on graphene. The project focused on three specific device concepts for potential future products: graphene microphones, graphene-membrane pressure sensors and graphene-membrane Hall sensors.

The target markets for these devices include portable electronics (smartphones, laptops), automotive, industrial, and smart homes, among others.

Vollebak, a sports gear manufacturer with an affinity towards using next-gen materials and technologies, is now selling (for 595 euros!) a graphene-enhanced jacket that according to the company, can perform functions like absorbing heat and then warming you up over time, conducting electricity, repelling bacteria, and dissipating your body’s excess humidity.

The process of developing Vollebak’s jacket, according to the company’s cofounders, brothers Steve and Nick Tidball, took years of intensive research. The jacket is reportedly made out of a two-sided material, which the company invented during the extensive R&D process. The graphene side is gray, while the other side appears matte black. To create it, the scientists turned raw graphite into graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs) that were then blended with polyurethane to create a membrane. That, in turn, is bonded to nylon to form the other side of the material, which Vollebak says alters the properties of the nylon itself. Adding graphene to the nylon fundamentally changes its mechanical and chemical propertiesa nylon fabric that couldn’t naturally conduct heat or energy, for instance, now can, the company claims.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed new theories regarding the compression of water under a high-gradient electric field. They found that a high electric field applied to a tiny hole in a graphene membrane would compress the water molecules travelling through the pore by 3%. The predicted water compression may eventually prove useful in high-precision filtering of biomolecules for biomedical research.

The team commented: "This is an unexpected phenomenon, contrary to what we thought we knew about nanopore transport. It took three years to work out what it was the simulations were showing us. After exploring many potential solutions, the breakthrough came when we realized that we should not assume water is incompressible. Now that we understand what's happening in the computer simulations, we are able to reproduce this phenomenon in theoretical calculations."