As the world’s power needs grow, the search is on for better battery technology — not just to keep smartphones charged for longer,…
Last year saw the world’s first ISO standard for graphene being published which defines the terminology used to describe the material. Soon after, there were good practice guidelines for characterisation also released by the NGI and NPL. As a result, the industry is now able to achieve more robust testing and validation of graphene products.
Researchers at The University of Manchester have devised graphene sensors embedded into RFIDs, which have the potential to revolutionise the Internet of Things (IoT).
By layering graphene-oxide (a derivative of graphene) over graphene to create a flexible heterostructure the team have developed humidity sensors for remote sensing with the ability to connect to any wireless network.
Aluminum-ion batteries (AIB) have significant merits of low cost, non-flammability, and high-capacity metallic aluminum anodes based on three-electron redox properties. However, due to its inadequate cathodic performance, especially in terms of capacity, high-rate capability, and cycle life, AIB still cannot compete with Li-ion batteries and supercapacitors.
New approaches to filtration and extracting moisture from air promise to alleviate the world’s looming water scarcity crisis.
Filtration is being transformed by thin sheets of graphene, a carbon-based material invented in 2004 at Manchester University. Rahul Raveendran Nair, the university’s professor of materials physics, says graphene has the potential to deliver large quantities of clean water via desalination and the removal of pollutants.
Researchers from Rice University have discovered that nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes or modified graphene nanoribbons could potentially replace platinum, one of the most expensive facets in fuel cells, for performing fast oxygen reduction—a crucial reaction that transforms chemical energy into electricity.
A team of physicists from Cornell University in the US has developed electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing robots the size of a human cell.
The robots – described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – are made from atomically thin layers of graphene and glass. Known as biomorphs, the tiny machines bend when exposed to stimuli including heat, chemical reactions or electricity. They can transform in a fraction of a second from two dimensional planes into complex three-dimensional forms such as tetrahedra and cubes.
Graphene was meant to transform everything from the car tyre to the condom. There has never been so much hype around a new material. It’s easy to see why: its sheets of carbon atoms are incredibly strong, super-elastic and conduct heat better than most metals. The problem with graphene, however, is that it has yet to live up to its expectations commercially.
For centuries, metals were employed in optical applications only as mirrors and gratings. New vistas opened up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering and the use of surface plasmon (collective electronic oscillations at the surface of metals) resonances for sensing. However, it was not until the 1990s, with the appearance of accurate and reliable nanofabrication techniques, that plasmonics blossomed.
Back in 2004, two Russian scientists at the UK’s University of Manchester managed to produce the world’s first two-dimensional material by isolating a single layer of graphite atoms, something researchers had been attempting to achieve since the 70s, which eventually earned the Manchester-based team a Nobel prize in 2010. While numerous developments, such as carbon nanotubes, have arisen from the original research, useful and genuinely disruptive graphene-based innovations have so far been elusive due to the exorbitant cost of producing the material.