Entries by John Are Beukes

Versarien to supply graphene to the CPI

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.

Start-Ups Demonstrate Success in Graphene-Enhanced Thermoplastics and Electrical Applications

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 […]

Graphene: The Game-Changing Material of the Future

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 […]

Graphene-assisted high-efficiency liquid crystal tunable terahertz metamaterial absorber

In this paper, few-layer porous graphene is integrated onto the surface of a metasurface layer to provide a uniform static electric field to efficiently control liquid crystal, thereby enabling flexible metamaterial designs. We demonstrate a tunable cross-shaped metamaterial absorber with different arm lengths driven by this combined metasurface and graphene electrode. The resulting absorber supports […]

Bio-inspired electrochemical corrosion coatings derived from graphene/natural lacquer composites

Protective corrosion coatings are preferably composed of available, environmentally friendly, and low-volatility organic compounds. Herein, new excellent corrosion graphene/raw lacquer composite coatings were formed, in which waterborne graphene was modified by taking lignin tripolymer (LT) as an aqueous stabilizer and subsequently adding to raw lacquer (RL). Graphene/lacquer composite coatings were achieved by an eco-friendly fabrication […]

Three-dimensional graphene networks and reduced graphene oxide nanosheets co-modified dye-sensitized solar cells

Graphene assisted dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have drawn increasing attention because of their high performances. However, two bottlenecks (the high defect density and the discontinuous structure) of the widely adopted reduced graphene oxide (RGO) nanosheets bring about that the practical photovoltaic properties are far inferior to the theoretical prediction values. Therefore, three-dimensional graphene networks (3DGNs) […]