Solar thermal collectors represent a simple and inexpensive way to make use of solar energy. Pure water is an efficient heat-transfer fluid, but it must be mixed with antifreeze to prevent damage to pipes during freezing conditions, and this lowers its performance. Now, researchers in Portugal have discovered that the addition of graphene to the working fluid helps to regain some of that lost efficiency.
Tag Archive for: industry
An international group of researchers, including scientists from Shinshu University in Japan and Penn State’s ATOMIC Center, created a graphene and graphene oxide-based coating for desalination membranes which are said to be more scalable and sturdier than current nanofiltration membrane technologies available.
A powdery mix of metal nanocrystals wrapped in single-layer sheets of carbon atoms, developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), shows promise for safely storing hydrogen for use with fuel cells for passenger vehicles and other uses. And now, a new study provides insight into the atomic details of the crystals’ ultrathin coating and how it serves as selective shielding while enhancing their performance in hydrogen storage.
Graphene is a super-strong, ultra-lightweight material that’s led to scores of technological innovations in recent years. It consists of bonded carbon atoms formed into sheets that measure just one atom thick. The material’s strength to weight ratio makes it ideal for all sorts of applications ranging from desalination filters that produce clean drinking water to batteries that charge up in seconds, and even next-gen LED bulbs. Graphene is even being used to make solar cells produce electricity in the rain, leading us to believe the most amazing graphene-based gadgets have yet to come.
A £1m project is set to pioneer new graphene-based technology to help address the world’s clean drinking water crisis.
Manchester-based G2O Water Technologies is leading the scheme to accelerate development of its patented system that has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of water filtration.
A team of researchers of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), in collaboration with a colleague from RIKEN (Institute for Physical and Chemical Research in Japan), has provided theoretical proof of the existence of a new class of materials, spin-valley half-metals. Their paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The discovery has potential applications in implantable electronics and devices based on graphene, nanotubes, and a number of other promising materials.
The Smart Filter project received new Innovate UK funding that follows a previous £700,000 project grant awarded in 2015. The previous grant enabled a two-year project by G2O and the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), focused on transferring and scaling up the water filtration technology from laboratory to industry, ensuring the technology is usable with full quality control.
A team of Graphene Flagship researchers led by the University of Manchester reported in the journal Science showing the first new type of quantum oscillation to be reported for thirty years. This occurs by applying a magnetic field and it is the first of its kind to be present at high temperature and on the mesoscale. This research also sheds light on the Hofstadter butterfly phenomenon.
With buyers uncertain of how to integrate graphene into their products and suppliers often in a race against time to bring a product to market, can the gap be bridged?
The myriad industries that potentially can be impacted by graphene seems at times a bewildering blizzard of possibilities with no clear path on how to access any of them. If graphene does work for applications ranging from photovoltaics to advanced composites, how does it do it and how can those underlying industries extract the benefits from it for their products?
Scarce metals are found in a wide range of everyday objects around us. They are complicated to extract, difficult to recycle and so rare that several of them have become “conflict minerals” which can promote conflicts and oppression. A survey at Chalmers University of Technology now shows that there are potential technology-based solutions that can replace many of the metals with carbon nanomaterials, such as graphene.