Description
This month we begin and end with turbostratic graphene. This is graphene powder made by the bottom up method (assembly of graphene atom by atom). Two different methods producing similar material, a graphene where the layers are randomly rotated slightly as they stack. At the start of the month we describe the turbostratic graphene made by Graphene CR. Then at the end Professor James Tour’s team at Rice University has made this material in the lab from waste carbon material and called it flash graphene. Turbostratic graphene is interesting because its layers are more weakly held together and it holds a promise for better blending and therefore improving the performance of composite materials.
A new start up company QV Bioelectronics has developed a graphene implant that can help treat brain cancer and give patients longer and better quality of life than they would otherwise. The company is seeking seed funding.
A new superlative has been added to graphene. It is now the most fatigue resistant material ever tested, taking more than a billion stress cycles before the material fails.
A giant multinational, Goodyear, has turned its attention to graphene and is making a re-entry to the cycle tyre market after an absence of 44 years with its graphene enhanced Eagle F1 tyres. Directa Plus has announced a new trial with its graphene asphalt additive Gipave, this time at Rome’s Fiumicino international airport. Estonian graphene company Skeleton has another success to add to its performance. It will be supplying the graphene enhanced supercapacitors to the new trams for the city of Warsaw, Poland. Skeleton is rapidly becoming the most successful graphene supercapacitor company in the world by specialising in the kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) for public transport.
And finally, chicken faeces may not sound the most auspicious material to quote in the high-tech field of graphene and 2D materials. Researchers showed that the electrocatalytic effect of graphene can be significantly enhanced with guano. In doing so they demonstrated the futility of exploring combinations of dopants for graphene for the purpose of generating research papers for their own sake and boosting the academic rankings of the authors. In effect adding to the noise rather than contributing to the body of understanding of graphene and 2D materials.
We spend as much time filtering out unnecessary articles for you, dear reader, as we do on the content you see. Please read on to find out more about the quality rather than the quantity we have curated for you this month…
Adrian Nixon,
1st February 2020
