Scientists in China have developed an artificial sponge that can separate oil and water and can be used for treating water contaminated by industrial sewage, a media report said today. The porous material is made with nano-crystalline cellulose and graphene composite and has high absorption capacity.
Atomically thin graphene exhibits fascinating mechanical properties, although its hardness and transverse stiffness are inferior to those of diamond. So far, there has been no practical demonstration of the transformation of multilayer graphene into diamond-like ultrahard structures.
A study conducted at the University of São Paulo’s Physics Institute (IF-USP), Brazil, has resolved a longstanding controversy dogging the international community of researchers dedicated to investigating defects in graphene. The controversy is related to the calculation of the overall electronic structure of defects. This configuration, which comprises many variables, was described in different ways depending on the researcher and the model used. The solution, which is identical for all models and compatible with experimental findings, was obtained by Chilean Ana María Valencia García and her PhD supervisor, Marília Junqueira Caldas, Full Professor at IF-USP.
Graphene-oxide membranes have attracted considerable attention as promising candidates for new filtration technologies. Now the much sought-after development of making membranes capable of sieving common salts has been achieved.
Swinburne researchers have received 3.45 million AUD (around $2.64 USD) in funding to continue work on a project investigating energy storage alternatives using graphene oxide. Swinburne will receive the grant as part of the Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) funds commissioned by the Australian Government. The Swinburne Centre for Micro-Photonics is collaborating with Flinders University as well as First Graphene and Kremford.
The observation of large nonlocal resistances near the Dirac point in graphene has been related to a variety of intrinsic Hall effects, where the spin or valley degrees of freedom are controlled by symmetry breaking mechanisms. Engineering strong spin or valley Hall signals on scalable graphene devices could stimulate further practical developments of spin- and valleytronics.
Lithium ion batteries, as the name implies, work by shuffling lithium atoms between a battery’s two electrodes. So, increasing a battery’s capacity is largely about finding ways to put more lithium into those electrodes. These efforts, however, have run into significant problems. If lithium is a large fraction of your electrode material, then moving it out can cause the electrode to shrink. Moving it back in can lead to lithium deposits in the wrong places, shorting out the battery.
Imagine a material as flexible and lightweight as foil that becomes stiff and hard enough to stop a bullet on impact. In a newly published paper in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers across The City University of New York (CUNY) describe a process for creating diamene: flexible, layered sheets of graphene that temporarily become harder than diamond and impenetrable upon impact.
A research team from the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland and Sapienza University in Rome developed a new loud speaker that is driven by a light signal – and without electricity. The idea is to use modulated light that shines on a 3D graphene sponge. The audio is achieved via a highly-efficient photo-mechanism.
In the last few years, a new form of graphene has garnered increasing interest. Dubbed “artificial graphene,” this latest addition to the 2D landscape is not formed from a single atomic layer of graphite. Instead it is synthesized from other materials to have the same honeycomb lattice molecular structure as graphene, but modified to have specific electronic properties.