Researchers at the University of Arkansas, led by professor Paul Thibado, have found strong evidence that the internal motion of 2D materials could be used as a source of clean, limitless energy. The team has reportedly taken the first steps toward creating a device that can turn this energy into electricity, with the potential for many applications. A patent has recently been applied on this invention, called a Vibration Energy Harvester, or VEH.
The Graphene Week Innovation Forums brought industrial and commercial graphene research to the forefront, highlighting key challenges and successes in the journey from lab to the factory floor.
What types of graphene are used today for which types of applications and which applications are the priority? Results of a survey of 370 graphene developers, users and producers.
The first UK-China Graphene Standardization Cooperation Working Group Conference, recently held in Chongqing, China, brought news of an agreement to collaborate on developing and submitting a co-authored International Organization for Standardization (ISO) proposal by February 2018. This joins other recent graphene standardization efforts, like NPL & NGI’s good practice guide for graphene metrology and NPL’s first ISO (International Organization for Standardization) graphene standard.
Researchers at India’s Institute of Nano Science and Technology (INST) have developed a new route for the scalable preparation of large area few-layer graphene from waste biomass (nutshells) for high-performance energy storage devices.
PPG, longtime developer of paints, coatings and other materials, has announced it has entered into a partnership with SiNode Systems, an advanced materials company developing silicon-graphene materials for next-gen batteries, to accelerate the commercialization of high-energy anode materials for advanced battery applications in electric vehicles.
Researchers from Spain’s ICN2 institute have discovered that graphene/TMDC heterostructures can exhibit etremely long spin relaxation lifetime. These structure feature lifetimes that are orders of magnitude larger than anything observed in 2D materials – and in fact these results point to a qualitatively new regime of spin relaxation.
When it comes to graphene research centers, one would be likely to think of Manchester (UK) where the National Graphene Institute (NGI) has its own center and is in the process of building a second– The Graphene Engineering and Innovation Centre (GEIC). However, there is a new center that has recently been established at the University of Mississippi (USA) in a joint collaborative venture between the University and the National Graphene Association (NGA).
Speaking in the session on Graphene and Emerging 2D Materials for Photonics Applications in Coventry, UK, last month, Anna Baldycheva of the University of Exeter, UK, claimed that the discovery of 2D materials has prompted a renaissance in the area of liquid crystals. One technique that has been made possible by the reinvigoration of this field was the subject of Baldycheva’s presentation: the integration of microfluidic channel-hosted dispersions of 2D materials with silicon wafer-based photonic devices.
Graphene is at the core of the largest European research initiative to date, The Graphene Flagship, but within this megaproject there are also studies of other two-dimensional materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD). The interesting properties of TMDs can be applied in electronics, spintronics and a third field: valleytronics, as the physicist Dr Lucian Covaci of the University of Antwerp explains in this interview.