Textiles - Page 11

Australia-based Imagine IM announced that Australia plans to become the first country to use graphene in the large scale manufacture of an industrial product; The company had entered into a licensing agreement with Australian geotextiles manufacturer, Geofabrics Australasia, and the insight gained from working with Geofabrics was key to the development of the graphene manufacturing solution. Geofabrics is scheduled to provide the marketplace with the first of its graphene-coated geotextile products in August 2016.

The agreement will see Geofabrics become the exclusive Australian licensee of Imagine IM's graphene coating technology for applications in geotextiles. Geofabrics will use the technology to offer Australian civil engineering companies significantly improved capacity to locate and remedy leaks with applications in landfill and mining construction.

A team of scientists from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Korea announced the successful development of a technology to make a washable, flexible and highly-sensitive textile-type gas sensor.

This technology is based on coating graphene using molecular adhesives to textile like nylon, cotton, or polyester so that textile can check whether or not gas exists in the air. When graphene oxides meet the NO2 found in methane gases at room temperatures, their resistivity changes based on the gas density. Consequently, when putting out a fire or entering an area in which air conditions are hard to determine, it will be possible for firefighters to check the condition of the air through a connected device by wearing work clothes with gas sensors made from textiles.

An international team of scientists, including ones from the University of Exeter, the Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers, Microsystems and Nanotechnology (INESC-MN) in Lisbon, the Universities of Lisbon and Aveiro in Portugal and the Belgian Textile Research Centre (CenTexBel) designed a new technique for embedding transparent and flexible graphene electrodes into fibers commonly used in the textile industry.

This could lead the way to creating wearable electronic devices such as clothing containing computers, phones and MP3 players, which are lightweight and durable. The scientists state that the possibilities for its use are endless, including textile GPS systems, biomedical monitoring, personal security or even communication tools for the sensory impaired.

The Hohenstein institute, along with the companies IoLiTec Ionic Liquids Technologies from Heilbronn and FUCHSHUBER TECHNO-TEX- from Lichtenstein, and Belgian project partners Centexbel and Soieries Elite, have been working on a research project designed to explore the use of graphene in the textile sector.

The research, called GRAFAT, explores the use of graphene for the surface modification of textiles in heat protective clothing. Using graphene to modify the surface can significantly improve the flame-retardant properties of a textile. Graphene can act as a physical barrier, effectively preventing the penetration of heat and gases. At the same time, graphene also has the potential to prevent the thermal decomposition of the textile. In addition, graphene also improves the textile's resistance to abrasion and rupture.

Italy's Directa Plus inaugurated their new graphene factory in Lomazzo, Como, Italy. This plant produces graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs) and has a 30-ton yearly capacity - which the company says is the largest such production plant in Europe. The company says that this is just the first phase of this plant.

The plant will produce Directa Plus' four carbon material types: super-expanded graphite, pristine GNPs, water-dispersed GNPs and fine nanographite powder. All of those materials are marketed under the G+ brand.

Researchers from Australia and Ireland developed a flexible yarn made from graphene oxide. This strong, lightweight, highly conductive and high capacitance fiber may be a great material for wearable textiles.

The researchers report that the new yarns and fibers exhibit the best electrochemical capacitance ever - of as high as 410 F/g. To create the fiber, the researchers used a novel wet-spinning technique that can produce both GO and r-GO yarns of unlimited lengths. Those yarns are strong (with a Young’s modulus that is greater than 29 GPa), have a high electrical conductivity of around 2500 S/m and a very large surface area about 2600 m2/g for graphene oxide and 2210 m2/g for the reduced material.

Researchers from Korea's Incheon National University developed a new way to make conductive, flexible, and durable textiles (fabrics) wrapped with reduced graphene oxide (RGO). They report that those materials are useful to make conductive wires or functional fabrics in wearable electronics and more.

The main breakthrough is the choice of bovine serum albumin (BSA) - an amphiphilic protein that can be attached to organic and inorganic materials through hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions - basically this is molecular "glue" that helps with graphene-oxide adsorption into any textile. The researchers fabricated those electrostatic self-assembly of BSA molecules onto all sorts of textiles (nylon yarns, cotton yarns, etc.) and then used a low-temperature chemical reduction.