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.
Many battery scientists are interested in the potential of lithium sulfur batteries because, at least in theory, they offer a high energy density at relatively low cost. However, lithium sulfur batteries face a number of challenges, including the low electrical conductivity of sulfur and the tendency of the cathode to expand significantly in size during the discharge cycle—a tendency that prevents the cathode material from being packed as densely in the battery as scientists would like.
Graphene Flagship scientists, led by researchers at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, have detected graphene’s out-of-plane heat transfer in van der Waals heterostructures. In their paper published in Nature Nanotechnology they follow this process in real-time. This phenomenon has many implications for optoelectronic devices.
Rechargeable aluminum-ion batteries are promising in high-power density but still face critical challenges of limited lifetime, rate capability, and cathodic capacity. The authors design a “trihigh tricontinuous” (3H3C) graphene film cathode with features of high quality, orientation, and channeling for local structures (3H) and continuous electron-conducting matrix, ion-diffusion highway, and electroactive mass for the whole electrode (3C).
It may be possible to engineer the nanoscale-patterned semiconductor material to produce exotic electronic properties. The research, at the engineering department of Columbia University in New York City, centred around an attempt to reproduce the electronic structure of graphene in a synthetic semiconductor device.
Researchers from the Siberian Federal University (SFU), the Krasnoyarsk Research Center at the Siberian Division of the RAS, and the National University of Science and Technology MISIS have reported graphene-enhanced rechargeable lithium-ion batteries with double the capacity. To do so, they created anodes with graphene and vanadium disulfide.
In a successful collaboration between the Graphene Flagship and the European Space Agency, experiments testing graphene for two different space-related applications have shown extremely promising results. Based on these results, the Flagship are continuing to develop graphene devices for use in space.
Elcora Advanced Materials has announced the development of graphene-infused lithium-ion batteries for fast charge applications.
Elcora states that its expertise in graphene and lithium-ion battery technology will assist in this project, and that it is presently working with strategic partners (as well as in its in-house Lithium-Ion R&D Battery Lab) in development of applications.