This week's Graphene-info personal interview features Graphene Frontiers' Michael Patterson. If you wish to be featured, contact us here.

• Michael Patterson, CEO of Graphene Frontiers: I set the direction and focus for our company, ensure that my brilliant and talented teammates have the tools and resources to do their jobs, and then try to stay out of the way of progress :-)

The UK's Perpetuus signed a preliminary agreement to supply Japan's Graphene Platform Corporation with DBD plasma reactors.

Tokyo-based Graphene Platform is a graphene materials producer that intends to use the Perpetuus plasma reactor technology to manufacture functionalised graphenes in Asia. It is expected that GPC will manufacture and supply hundreds of tonnes of plasma functionalised graphenes to its Far East customer base, allowing them to progress from R&D to commercialisation in the enhanced composite, energy storage and advanced electronic application markets.

Stanford's recent development of a graphene-aluminum battery that is flexible, safe, stable and capable of charging quickly has been piquing interest around the world.

Here is a video that demonstrates this extraordinary battery:

Malaysian-based Felda Global Ventures Holdings (FGV) aims to set up a graphene plant in the country within two years and become the largest graphene materials producer in Asia.

FGV Executive Vice-President of the Palm Downstream Cluster said that the RM15 million (around 4,080,000 USD) plant is expected to have a production capacity of 9 kilogramme of graphene per day. The location of the plant is unspecified, but is expected to be located at one of FGV's mills.

Representatives of The Canadian Sunvault recently attended the Wall Street Conference in Florida where they presented a 1000 farad graphene supercapacitor. This is claimed by the company to be the largest graphene supercapacitor developed to date and a technology that will in the future compete with, if not potentially replace, the lithium battery. 

The company's CEO was also quoted at the conference: "Currently the cost to manufacture a lithium battery is about $500 (USD) per/ kWh. Tesla recently announced a Super Factory to be built in Nevada, with a promise to get the price of lithium batteries down to $150 USD per kWh by 2020, our current cost estimated for this type of graphene base supercapacitor is about $100 per kWh today and we feel confident we should be able to cut this pricing in half by the end of 2015".

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a grant of around $4.6 million for four projects to develop advanced hydrogen storage materials that hold the potential to enable longer driving ranges and help make innovative fuel cell systems. Among these four projects are two that involve graphene: graphene-based storage materials and hydrogen sorbents based on high surface area graphene.
         
The Ames Laboratory of Ames, Iowa, will receive up to $1.2 million to investigate the development of high-capacity silicon-based borohydride/graphene composite hydrogen storage materials. This project ims to develop reversible, high-capacity hydrogen storage materials with sorption kinetics.

Researchers at Stanford University developed a new battery technology based on graphene and aluminum. The stanford team claims that their aluminum battery has a number of advantages over lithium: it's flexible, can be charged in a minute instead of hours and is very durable. it's also cheaper and non-reactive (meaning compromising it will not result in sparks like lithium batteries).

The scientists used graphene foam (made by creating a metal foam, then catalyzing graphene formation on its surface) as cathode material and aluminum foil as the anode. The electrolyte the researchers used was a solution of aluminum trichloride dissolved in an organic solvent that also contained chlorine. While this granted better performance (7,500 cycles, much more than the 1,000 expected from a Li-ion battery), the voltage provided by an aluminum-ion battery is only about half of that what you'd get from a lithium-ion cell. Also, the overall power density (the amount of power you can store in a battery in relation to its size) is still insufficient.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST) discovered that reduced graphene oxide (rGO) can be used in a unique sensor to detect a deadly cancer-causing food toxin with high sensitivity.

The toxin, Aflatoxin B1, is a common contaminant in peanuts, chillies, cottonseed meal, corn, rice and other grains. Produced by a fungus, it is a potent liver carcinogen that damages the immune system in humans and animals.

This week's Graphene-info personal interview features Andrew T. Smaha. If you wish to be featured, contact us here.

• Gilbert Daniel Nessim, Nano Scientist, well, I mean scientist of average size focused on the synthesis of nanostructures such as 1-D (CNTs, CNFs, NWs) and 2D (graphene, TM dichalcogenides, etc.). I run the lab for the synthesis of nanostructures in the chemistry department at Bar Ilan University, Israel.

South Korea aims to start producing and selling graphene-based products in the next two years, expecting to see the first commercial product, an electromagnetic shield, in 2017. This follows the $40 million investment in graphene technologies made by the Korean government in 2013. 

The recent plan, unveiled at a meeting of the National Science and Technology Council, stresses that the government will continue to support research and development of related technologies that will enable mass production of the material by 2020.