A £1m project is set to pioneer new graphene-based technology to help address the world’s clean drinking water crisis.
Manchester-based G2O Water Technologies is leading the scheme to accelerate development of its patented system that has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of water filtration.
A team of researchers of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), in collaboration with a colleague from RIKEN (Institute for Physical and Chemical Research in Japan), has provided theoretical proof of the existence of a new class of materials, spin-valley half-metals. Their paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The discovery has potential applications in implantable electronics and devices based on graphene, nanotubes, and a number of other promising materials.
The Smart Filter project received new Innovate UK funding that follows a previous £700,000 project grant awarded in 2015. The previous grant enabled a two-year project by G2O and the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), focused on transferring and scaling up the water filtration technology from laboratory to industry, ensuring the technology is usable with full quality control.
A team of Graphene Flagship researchers led by the University of Manchester reported in the journal Science showing the first new type of quantum oscillation to be reported for thirty years. This occurs by applying a magnetic field and it is the first of its kind to be present at high temperature and on the mesoscale. This research also sheds light on the Hofstadter butterfly phenomenon.
With buyers uncertain of how to integrate graphene into their products and suppliers often in a race against time to bring a product to market, can the gap be bridged?
The myriad industries that potentially can be impacted by graphene seems at times a bewildering blizzard of possibilities with no clear path on how to access any of them. If graphene does work for applications ranging from photovoltaics to advanced composites, how does it do it and how can those underlying industries extract the benefits from it for their products?
Scarce metals are found in a wide range of everyday objects around us. They are complicated to extract, difficult to recycle and so rare that several of them have become “conflict minerals” which can promote conflicts and oppression. A survey at Chalmers University of Technology now shows that there are potential technology-based solutions that can replace many of the metals with carbon nanomaterials, such as graphene.
The advanced materials engineering group Versarien announced that it has won a tender for the ongoing supply of nanomaterials to the Centre for Process Innovation. Versarien will supply up to 1.2 kilograms of graphene in a variety of forms to the CPI, in addition to hexagonal layer boron nitride.
Graphene, despite being hailed as a wonder material, has been slow to commericalize. Premature graphene scale-up by groups like Ningbo Morsh Technology and Angstron Materials led to an immense glut that has long outweighed demand. Lux emphasized graphene commercialization hurdles since 2012 and stressed that the materials-push, pursue-every-application approach many companies take is more likely to lead to failure than focused strategies. Start-ups in this struggling graphene space have since begun to eke out worthwhile applications, and Lux wanted to evaluate which areas are most promising.
echnology is only as good as the materials it is made from.
Much of the modern information era would not be possible without silicon and Moore’s Law, and electric cars would be much less viable without recent advances in the material science behind lithium-ion batteries.
That’s why graphene, a two-dimensional supermaterial made from carbon, is so exciting. It’s harder than diamonds, 300x stronger than steel, flexible, transparent, and a better conductor than copper (by about 1,000x).
If it lives up to its potential, graphene could revolutionize everything from computers to energy storage.
On investigating the electron spin g factor in graphene, Researchers discovered that, this factor is surprisingly insensitive to external effects such as mobility, density and charge carrier type.
The g factor is a key parameter that defines the spin properties of electrons in a material, with important implications in spintronic applications.