October 2011

XG Sciences announced that it has signed a license agreement with Cabot Corporation. XG Sciences will provide Cabot with non-exclusive rights to XG Sciences’ low-cost graphene Nanoplatelets production technology. XG Sciences will also agrees to sell a certain amount of products to Cabot on a long-term basis.

XG Sciences says that this is a $4 million agreement - I do not know whether this includes the product sales or just the license agreement.

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China developed a new robot that's made by layering a polyethylene film onto a glass layer and an adding a layer of graphene that is used to convert photothermal energy from infra red light. The robot can pick, move and drop objects. Such a design may be useful for surgery, for example. It can also inspire the design of transparent artificial muscles.

The team prepared the actuator by layering a polyethylene film onto a glass layer. On top of this, they added a graphene layer, which can absorb infrared light and convert this energy into heat with a high efficiency. The graphene - a sheet of carbon atoms one atom thick - also combines high transparency with strong mechanical performance. A strip of graphene on polyethylene that was 3mm by 12mm was then cut out and peeled off the glass, after which the strip curled up.

Researchers from the University of Illinois found out that the quality of graphene depends on the crystal structure of the copper substrate it grows on. Some copper structures results in high-quality graphene, and some do not. Obviously the higher-quality graphene is grown on more expensive and complicated structures...

The researchers now hope to use their methodology to study the growth of other two-dimensional materials, including insulators to improve graphene device performance.

Korean researchers fabricated a stretchable, transparent graphene-based transistor. They say that the new to transistor overcomes some of the problems faced by transistors made of conventional semiconductor materials - which simply cannot be made stretchable and transparent on substrates such as rubber slabs or balloons.

To make the transistor, the researchers synthesized single layers of graphene and then stacked them layer by layer on copper foil. Using photolithography and etching techniques, the researchers patterned some of the transistor’s essential elements, including the electrodes and semiconducting channel, onto the graphene. After transferring these components onto a stretchable rubber substrate, the researchers printed the remaining components gate insulators and gate electrodes onto the device using stretchable ion gel.

HDPlas (a subsidiary of the ICL Group) announced that their graphene and graphene nano platelets (GNPs) are now available in research, development and commercial quantities. The company is using their patented "Split-Plasma" process to produce graphene in single, bi and tri layer structures.

The HDPlas products are available online in the UK on HDPlas.com. Their exclusive sales agent ni the US is Cheap Tubes.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania won the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps award (which includes a $50,000 prize money). The researchers developed technology to manufacture large graphene sheets at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. The process is reliable and simple.

The researchers also established a new company called Graphene Frontiers to commercialize this technology.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK say that adding gold (

Using just nickel, a temperature of about 1000ºC is required to grow 15µm crystals. The gold cuts the chance of nucleation, which allows the carbon crystals to grow bigger before they hit one another. This reduces the temperature needed to grow the same 15µm crystals to about 450ºC.

Researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany discovered a new material which is graphene-like in nature. The new material is formed from strontium, manganese, and bismuth atoms and is called SrMnBi2. You can change the physical properties of this new material by doping, which may lead to new magnets, insulators or superconductors.

Researchers from UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) developed a new scalable method to synthesize high-quality and high-uniformity graphene (both mono-layer and bi-layer).

The team method is based around the graphene's growth kinetics under the influence of the substrate. Their approach uses a method called low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) and involves disintegrating the hydrocarbon gas methane at a specific high temperature to build uniform layers of carbon (as graphene) on a pre-treated copper substrate.

Researchers from the University of Silesia in Poland are looking into using Graphene and Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to remove excess cholesterol from living tissues. Using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, the team says that a graphene sheet (of 720 carbon atoms), placed 2.3 nm from cholesterol-covered 1LQV protein significantly increased the mobility of the cholesterol molecules, reflecting their migration onto the graphene surface.

After this migration, a large number of cholesterol molecules were removed from the cluster surrounding the protein.