Xolve (previously Graphene Solutions) announced that it has raised $2 million in funds, from both strategic and financial investors. The company is working to commercialize intellectual property that enables simple room temperature processing of graphene and other nanoparticle composites, solutions and coatings.
Researchers from General Motors Global Research & Development Center and HRL Labs (owned by Boeing and GM) says that they were able to enhance the high rate capability of Li-ion anode materials through the use of vertically aligned graphene nanosheets on the current collector.
Vorbeck materials has received an EPA LoREX approval for its Vor-ink Graphene product. Vorbeck says that Vor-ink is the first available EPA-approve graphene product in the US.
Vor-ink offers exceptional conductivity and it can be dried and cured under the same conditions as graphic ink as it's not metallic.
A new research by Chris Marianetti from Columbia University tries to find out how and why does graphene break. Marianetti has revealed the mechanisms of mechanical failure of pure graphene under tensile stress. When graphene is subject to strain equal in all directions, it morphs into a new structure which is mechanically unstable.
Marianetti says this failure mechanism is a novel soft-mode phonon instability. A phonon is a collective vibrational mode of atoms within a crystal, similar to a wave in a liquid. The fact that a phonon becomes "soft" under tensile strain means that the system can lower its energy by distorting the atoms along the vibrational mode and transitioning to a new crystalline arrangement. Under sufficient strain, graphene develops a particular soft-mode that causes the honeycomb arrangement of carbon atoms to be driven towards isolated hexagonal rings. This new crystal is structurally weaker, resulting in the mechanical failure of the graphene sheet.
Researchers from Cornell have developed large arrays of nanoscale resonators using Graphene. Each resonator is made of a film of graphene that oscillates back and forth in response to a mechanical force applied to its surface or to an electrical field.
The Cornell group first etched trenches into the surface of a silicon wafer. They then topped the wafer with a film of graphene grown on top of copper. The graphene sticks to the surface of the silicon wafer like plastic cling wrap would. The researchers finally add electrical contacts to the graphene to complete the resonators.