Wuxi Graphene Film, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Sixth Elements Materials, has launched a new graphene-enhanced product in the Chinese market: The GF1 Graphene Watch. It is a smart health watch, with CVD graphene film acting as the conductive element for the touch screen (as a replacement for the usually-used ITO).

The Company kindly sent us one of these new watches to try out. So thanks! and here are our impressions: First of all, it is an attractive-looking watch, with a futuristic design and a quality feel to it. The display is a 1.3'' monochrome white OLED with a 128X64 resolution. The watch comes with an accompanying app, and includes features like pulse and heart rate monitoring, step meter, sleep quality tracking and more.

UK-based advanced materials group Haydale Graphene Industries has entered into a commercial supply and development agreement with Australian-listed Talga Resources. The agreement will see the two companies work together on the production, sales and marketing of jointly developed graphene-based transparent conductive ink products for industrial applications in Asia.

The two companies have been working together for a few years, and will now look to enhance the properties of Haydale’s graphene-based, transparent conductive ink by using Talga’s highly conductive graphitic materials. Initial tests showed that Talga’s material can enhance electrical conductivity of Haydale's transparent inks by 15% or more above that of synthetic graphite.

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• The properties of graphene
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Researchers at The University of Manchester and the NGI have shown how graphene and boron nitride can be used for observing nanomaterials in liquids, by creating a ‘petri-dish’ of sorts.

Scanning / transmission electron microscopy (S/TEM) is one of only few techniques that allows imaging and analysis of individual atoms. However, the S/TEM instrument requires a high vacuum to protect the electron source and to prevent electron scattering from molecular interactions. Several studies have previously revealed that the structure of functional materials at room temperature in a vacuum can significantly different from that in their normal liquid environment. So, it is important to be able to study the structure at the required state.

Directa Plus has provided a trading update for the year that has recently ended. The Company states that it has performed well during the second half of 2017 with revenues more than doubling over those achieved for the first half. As a result, the Board anticipates reporting full year 2017 revenue of approximately €0.9 million.

The financial position of the Company remains robust with year-end cash and cash equivalents expected to be approximately €7 million.

Versarien has announced the signing of a Letter of Intent (LOI) to establish a graphene manufacturing center in China.

The non-binding LOI has been entered into by Versarien together with the Shandong Institute of Industrial Technology Fund, Jinan Qing Na Material Technology and Jinan Innovation Zone Administrative Committee with the view to establishing the China-UK Jinan Graphene Industrial Park in the Jinan Innovation Zone, Shandong Province, China.

In early October 2017 we posted about Nanotech Engineering's novel graphene-enhanced solar panel, a post that raised many eyebrows. Nanotech says that their graphene panel reaches a 92% efficiency (compared to around 20% for large commercial silicon-based PV panels), and the cost per Watt of their panel will be 0.55 cents (compared to a US average of $3.26 for silicon PV panels).

Graphene-CNT junctions (source: Rice University)

Our post quoted Nanotech's PR, stating that Jeffrey Grossman, Professor of Engineering at MIT verified the technology and said that Pound for pound, the new solar cells produce up to 1,000 times more power than conventional photovoltaics.

The audio field has been experiencing a major graphene boom recently. In addition to various existing headphones and earbuds, a graphene contact enhancer is now on the market. A new-Zealand based company called Mad Scientist Audio is selling its Graphene Contact Enhancer (GCE) that can be used on any metal-to-metal contacts, such as RCA plugs and sockets, loudspeaker leads, fuses, and so on.

The product is said to 'fill in the gaps' and give a profound improvement in system performance when applied to the important contacts in a system (e.g interconnects, speaker leads, power cords, fuses, tube pins, etc). It reportedly does not suffer from the problems that silver-based products do, namely oxidation and ability to cause short circuits.

Canada-based Graphene Innovation & Technologies (GIT) has recently announced been its participation in a Nova Scotia Business (NSBI) Productivity and Innovation Voucher Program with Centre for Water Resource Studies at Dalhousie University. The program will facilitate comprehensive research into using multilayer graphene in protective coatings for marine-based applications.

The goal of this collaboration is to investigate environmentally friendly alternatives to marine anti-fouling coatings, many of which function by releasing potentially harmful copper oxide particles into the ocean. The team has begun an extensive research project comparing the performance of GIT’s GrapheneCoat formulations against conventional anti-fouling coatings. Sensitive testing is being used to finely monitor the growth rates of microorganisms on the coated samples.

Researchers at The University of Central Florida have come up with a finding that enables graphene to better absorb light and showed more than 45% absorption of light in a single layer of graphene. This may open the door to graphene-enhanced applications that require the incident light to be fully utilized, like next-generation light detectors, touchscreens, and more.

This is the first published work on extremely high light absorption in graphene which is tunable dynamically, the researchers said. Theoretical studies show further design optimization can lead to further enhanced absorption close to 90%.