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Nixene Journal Volume 9 Issue 5 Article 35
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Vol 6 Issue 10
Dear reader, you will know that we are tracking the progress of the biggest graphene companies in the world. Levidian is the biggest on paper with their announced £700 million ($780 m USD) contract with the UAE (vol 6 iss 6 p.26). The other company is Skeleton Technologies who make graphene enhanced supercapacitors for transport systems. They have been making steady progress over the past few years and have now announced a new €220 million ($215 m USD) super factory that will open in Germany in 2024. This will give the company an order of magnitude increase in production capacity (p.32 of this issue). Skeleton have also announced they have been awarded the contract to supply supercapacitors for the latest metro units in the Spanish city of Grenada (p.22). Further industrial progress is being made in the USA. Cardea Bio is a manufacturer of graphene field effect transistor biosensors. Essentially these are lab-on-a-chip devices that will give an instant read out of medical conditions from a sample of body fluids. The company has mastered the art of mass production and its factories can produce up to 20,000 graphene sensors per month. They also report that next year they will have produced their millionth biosensor. This company is shaping up to be a formidable presence in the graphene biosensor market. On the research and technical side, there has been much progress in the quality control of graphene. Terrance Barkan convened a webinar of metrology experts from world class institutions in the UK, USA and South America. The Raman spectroscopy masterclass is well worth viewing if you need to understand how the quality of graphene is measured by this technique and its limitations (p.15). By coincidence this month researchers in India have developed a new technique for reliably measuring the number of layers of graphene in a sample. Rather than use an expensive raman spectrometer, they have found a much cheaper optical microscope can provide similar information (p.17). In the UK, researchers have published a literature review of sustainable fibres for polymer composites. The work clearly shows why sustainable natural fibres are not being adopted to replace synthetic fibres. Natural fibres are an order of magnitude weaker than their synthetic counterparts. There is room for optimism though. The study shows that graphene can enhance the strength of natural fibres in polymer composites and shows there is one primary candidate natural fibre that, with graphene, just might challenge the supremacy of synthetic fibres (p.18). You can find out about this and much more in this fascinating issue. Dear reader, I invite you to read on… Adrian Nixon 1st October 2022£45.00 View product -
Vol 7 Issue 1
Batteries feature several times in this issue of the journal. Dear Reader, you will know that energy density is the key performance metric we watch. The higher the energy density (Wh/kg) the further you can travel on a battery charge. Current lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have an energy density around 260Wh/kg. We have highlighted the work of a company developing lithium-sulphur technology (Li-S) vol 5 iss 12 p.35. They have claimed energy densities over three times that of current Li-ion batteries using graphene enhanced cell designs. You will probably guess that we have been following this company and contacted them multiple times. We have yet to see data to back up these extraordinary claims. It was with interest that we found an online discussion between battery experts, the consensus view is that Li-S technology can create higher energy densities than Li-ion. However, this comes at a cost of reduced battery life. Perhaps this is the reason we have yet to see data backing up the claims for Li-S technology. Then NASA announced they have been working on a new graphene enhanced battery technology. The graphene is used as the structure for a sulphur/selenium cathode and is based on holey graphene that NASA developed in 2017. A solid-state electrolyte separates the anode from a lithium metal anode. The interim results are promising. They have achieved an energy density of 500Wh/kg. The battery seems to be safer too. It resists impact damage and has a maximum operating temperature of 150°C. NASA anticipates this solid-state battery will start to become available within three to five years. Elsewhere in this issue we report on developments as diverse as graphene enhanced condoms in India to graphene enhanced polymers launched on a SpaceX rocket bound for the moon. There is so much more in between these two very different applications, I encourage you to read on… Adrian Nixon 1st January 2023£45.00 View product -
Vol 6 Issue 2
A graphene toaster was demonstrated for the first time at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas by Korean company Graphene Square. This may not sound like a world changing invention, but it is something worth paying attention to because this is a rare application for chemical vapour deposition (CVD) graphene in a consumer electronics device. Until now, CVD graphene has been used in very small pieces in sensors. This toaster has a piece of CVD graphene on the top and bottom glass panels making a transparent infrared grill. The graphene is made at a scale of 200mm x 150mm and this tells us a that the company has a viable CVD roll to roll process. The process can make graphene at this scale and also provides the capability to separate the graphene from the forming substrate to other surfaces, in this case glass. The next step is to do this commercially. Graphene Square admits this is still at least a year away. This is still impressive progress and tells us that the industrial manufacture of CVD graphene is developing quickly. CVD graphene is also in the news this month. British company Paragraf announced through Queen Mary University, London, that they can create graphene at wafer scale, and this could be a replacement for indium tin oxide (ITO). This was picked up by technology blogs around the world, and graphene manufacturer Versarien felt obliged to disclose it is working on a similar project with a graphene manufacturer in Korea. These announcements about CVD graphene touchscreens sound impressive. However, as far as we can tell from the current state of the art, the economic and technical cases are not sufficiently proven to convince us we will see this technology in the immediate future. The term ‘bottom-up graphene’ used to refer to CVD graphene assembled atom by atom. Graphene powder manufacturing has been evolving rapidly over the last few years and can now be made by atomic assembly methods too. We have summarised the various methods in our special feature. We also look at the implications for competitive activity, as these new manufacturing methods meet the new market dynamics driving the sustainability agenda. While we cannot state which individual companies will achieve success, we can make some predictions about the characteristics successful graphene powder manufacturers will need to have. We hope you agree this makes for fascinating reading along with the rest of the compelling content this issue. Adrian Nixon, 1st February 2022£45.00 View product -
Vol 5 Issue 5
It is not every month that a new allotrope of carbon is announced. The last time this happened was back in 2019 when researchers in the UK and Switzerland made a ring of 18 atoms called cyclocarbon (Vol3 iss9 p.12). This month a joint team in Germany and Finland have made a flat sheet of carbon atoms with 4 6 and 8 rings. They call this new material a biphenylene network (BPN). This new material seems to be exciting the researchers because it exhibits metallic character. It also opens the door to explore other potential allotropes of carbon. Graphene-metal composites also make another appearance this month. Two Indian organisations have been working on aluminium-graphene composites (Al-G). Tirupati graphite says it has made an Al-G composite that has 95% the electrical conductivity of copper with the light weight of aluminium (although no has been presented yet). The Maharaja Agrasen University has published a peer reviewed paper showing that 1% graphene powder produced a 67% increase in the ultimate strength of the aluminium composite. A joint team in the Netherlands and Germany has made a Pirani pressure sensor from multilayer CVD graphene. It is not only 100 times smaller than the state-of-the-art sensors; it consumes a fraction of the power and is so sensitive it can detect different gas molecules. Aerospace and automotive applications abound. A new car company, Viritech, has announced it is building an electric supercar with a range of 800km and a top speed in excess of 300km/hr. The company has rejected batteries in favour of a hydrogen fuel cell to generate the electricity. The hydrogen storage tank is made from graphene enhanced carbon fibre and is an integral part of the chassis. Production is due to start in 2023. Graphene enhanced concrete made the headlines this month. British construction company Nationwide Engineering and the University of Manchester’s Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) have created graphene enhanced concrete for the whole floor of a new building in Amesbury, UK. As well as being a practical success in CO2 reduction the use of graphene has reduced the quantity of materials involved by 30% and potentially cut the costs between 10 and 20%. This will catch on. Adrian Nixon, 1st June 2021£45.00 View product
