August 2023

Nanotech Energy, Soteria Battery Innovation Group, and Voltaplex Energy will be working together to address safety concerns related to e-bike batteries. The partnership aims to commercialize U.S produced non-flammable graphene-enhanced lithium-ion battery packs by early 2024.

As part of the production process, Nanotech Energy will combine Soteria’s metallized polymer current collectors with their own electrolyte and proprietary electrodes to create high energy, ultra-safe 18650 cells. These cells will initially be manufactured at Nanotech Energy’s facility in Chico, CA, with plans to expand production capacity in the US and Europe. Voltaplex Energy will then utilize these cells to develop battery packs specifically designed for the e-bike, robotics, medical, and military markets. Expansion into other small device markets is also anticipated.

As the world's largest graphene production and consumption country, China is playing an important role in promoting the graphene industry to a new height. For instance, Chinese scientific research teams have made important breakthroughs in graphene preparation, functionalization, and characterization. China has also made significant progress in the graphene industrialization. Many Chinese companies have established graphene production lines and achieved large-scale production. In addition, China is also actively promoting the application and promotion of graphene. The government has formulated a series of policies and plans to encourage the wide application of graphene in electronics, energy, materials, medical treatment, environment and other fields. Graphene has made important breakthroughs in the fields of heat dissipation, batteries, sensors, fibers, coatings, composite materials, etc., and is gradually commercialized.

If you are eager to learn more about the booming development of China's graphene industry and look for new business opportunities and partners, then you must not miss the upcoming 2023 China International Graphene Innovation Conference (GRAPCHINA 2023). As a grand event in the global graphene field, this conference will be held in Shanghai, China from November 10 to 12, 2023.

The conference will be jointly hosted by the National Graphene Innovation Center, Shanghai University and the Graphene Alliance (CGIA).

It was reported that China aims to accelerate the industrialization of materials like graphene and liquid metals, and so the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission jointly released a list of important new materials that they will focus on advancing.

These materials represent the direction and trend of the development of the new material industry, which is an important entry point for building new growth engines, the ministries said. For instance, the ministries called for their subordinate bodies to encourage enterprises to advance the industrialization of graphene in potential sectors such as rail traffic, aerospace equipment, new energy and new-generation information technologies.

A team of researchers, led by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, recently developed a path to mass-manufacture high-performance graphene sensors that can detect heavy metals and bacteria in flowing tap water. This advance could bring down the cost of such sensors to just US $1 each, allowing people to test their drinking water for toxins at home.

The sensors have to be extraordinarily sensitive to catch the minute concentrations of toxins that can cause harm. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration states that bottled water must have a lead concentration of no more than 5 parts per billion. Today, detecting parts-per-billion or even parts-per-trillion concentrations of heavy metals, bacteria, and other toxins is only possible by analyzing water samples in the laboratory, says Junhong Chen, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago and the lead water strategist at Argonne National Laboratory. But his group has developed a sensor with a graphene field-effect transistor (FET) that can detect toxins at those low levels within seconds.

Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) has announced that it has commissioned its graphene-enhanced coating blending plant and it is now operational after making its first 1,000-liter blend.

Updating investors on the commercialization progress and sales development of THERMAL-XR, the Company said the blending plant is expected to have the capacity to produce up to 500,000 liters of THERMAL-XR RESTORE coating a year, subject to graphene production, when operating two blends per eight-hour shift, 250 days per year. This capacity enables future service growth well into the future, it added.

A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley are reportedly leveraging the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory to produce higher-quality graphene aerogel than is possible on Earth.

It was announced that this week, the Crew-6 astronauts onboard the space station completed work on the team’s investigation, which was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The results could provide new insights into the underlying physics of graphene aerogel synthesis and lead to the development of novel material products.

Researchers from The University of Warwick, the University of Manchester, Brazil's Universidade Federal do Ceara and Turkey's Izmir Institute of Technology have tackled the long-standing conundrum of why graphene is so much more permeable to protons than expected by theory. 

A decade ago, scientists at The University of Manchester demonstrated that graphene is permeable to protons, nuclei of hydrogen atoms. The unexpected result sparked a debate because theory predicted that it would be extremely hard for a proton to permeate through graphene's dense crystalline structure. This had led to suggestions that protons permeate not through the crystal lattice itself, but through the pinholes in its structure.

Obtaining useful work from random fluctuations in a system at thermal equilibrium has long been considered impossible. In fact, in the 1960s eminent American physicist Richard Feynman effectively shut down further inquiry after he argued in a series of lectures that Brownian motion, or the thermal motion of atoms, cannot perform useful work. Recently, however, a new study has shown that Feynman may have been inaccurate. 

Three of the paper’s five authors are from the University of Arkansas Department of Physics. According to first author Paul Thibado, their study rigorously proves that thermal fluctuations of freestanding graphene, when connected to a circuit with diodes having nonlinear resistance and storage capacitors, does produce useful work by charging the storage capacitors. 

At the beginning of June 2023, Asus unveiled the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG49WCD, a gaming monitor that uses graphene for thermal management. Now, Asus has added the PG32UCDM and PG34WCDM gaming monitors, each based on a different OLED panel technology. 

The PG32UCDM uses a 32" QD-OLED panel, produced by Samsung Display. The PG34WCDM monitor is based on a 34" MLA (microlens) WOLED curved panel, produced by LG Display. Both monitors make use of a graphene film for heat dissipation.

Advanced Material Development (AMD) has announced signing a further contract with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). AMD’s Radar absorbing technology is now being incorporated by AMD into foam panels and will be used by JPL during the system level electromagnetic compatibility test for the Europa Clipper spacecraft later this year.

The Europa Clipper spacecraft will perform dozens of close flybys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, gathering detailed measurements from multiple instruments, including the radar instrument, to investigate whether the moon could have conditions suitable for life. Europa Clipper’s primary objective is to determine whether there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life.