XG Sciences (XGS) recently announced that it has entered into an Intellectual Property License, Joint Development and Commercialization Agreement with Niagara Bottling, a market leader in beverage packaging innovation and one of the largest beverage companies in the U.S.

The agreement provides XG Sciences with an exclusive license to Niagara’s patents and proprietary know-how related to the use of graphene nanoplatelets in PET in certain bottle applications. Under the agreement, Niagara will assist XGS with field engineering support to install products into the manufacturing lines for new customers greatly reducing the manufacturer’s time to market.

Graphene Composites, a UK-based company developing graphene-enhanced bulletproof shields, has exceeded its crowdfunding target. GC attempted to raise £300,000 on Crowdcube, but ended up raising £510,680 (around 676,625 USD).

Once Graphene Composites had hit its crowdfunding target, the company sent out a message to its supporters saying: Thank You - by investing in GC, you have not only invested in a company that should provide you with a healthy return and strong dividends, you are also enabling us to develop and deliver products that will truly improve the quality of life for many around the world. For example, our GC Shield active shooter protection in schools now, and eventually our Lightning Harvester renewable energy sources. Thank You, from all of us on the GC Team.

Graphenest has launched two products, based on a proprietary graphene production method, now available to pre-order with a campaign price for a limited time.

The first product is HexaShield, a graphene-based paintable coating for RF electromagnetic interference (EMI) and radiation shielding. It reportedly provides drastic weight reduction, and reduced manufacturing cost as compared to metals, while achieving the required protection for the Gigahertz frequency range.

Graphene Flagship partners Aernnova, Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria and Airbus have produced a leading edge for the Airbus A350 horizontal tail plane using graphene-enhanced composites. As the first part of the tail plane to contact air, the leading edge is subjected to extreme temperatures caused by compressive heating of the air ahead of the wing. Thus, it must possess excellent mechanical and thermal properties.

Aernnova supplied the resin to Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria who added graphene directly to the resin and applied milling forces, said Ana Reguero of Aernnova. This creates small graphene particles an important step to get good graphene infiltration within the resin, avoiding unwanted impurities, such as solvents, which can alter the viscosity of the resin. It is important to maintain the correct viscosity of the resin to ensure the optimal outcome during the resin transfer molding of the leading edge.

Versarien, the advanced materials engineering group, has announced that it has signed a supply agreement to provide Versarien's new graphene enhanced polymer range to AECOM for a current infrastructure project.

This supply agreement follows the collaboration Versarien entered into with AECOM, a US headquartered and Fortune 500 company. This collaboration covered a project that AECOM and Versarien have been undertaking involving the incorporation of Versarien's graphene nano-platelets into large scale polymer structures used in civil infrastructure projects, with a view to increasing their structural strength.

UK-based Perpetuus Advanced Materials announced the completion of a "real world" road testing program of car tires enhanced with surface-engineered graphene materials.

Over the last 6 months, Perpetuus graphene enhanced tires were fitted to high mileage, commercial light vehicles, which primarily travel on the UK’s A and B roads. The tests compared the graphene-enhanced tires with regular tires and monitored the performance of both tires. Perpetuus says that the tests showed that the graphene-enhanced tires produced an average of 40% increase in wear resistance over the regular tires.

Partners of the European Project 'Graphene Flagship' at the University of Strasbourg and CNRS (France), along with an international team of collaborators, created new 'switches' that respond to light. The team combined light-sensitive molecules with layers of graphene and other 2D materials to create new devices that could be used in sensors, optoelectronics and flexible devices.

The researchers designed a molecule that can reversibly undergo chemical transformations when illuminated with ultraviolet and visible light. This molecule (a photoswitchable spiropyran) can be then attached to the surface of materials like graphene or molybdenum disulfide, thus generating an atomically precise hybrid macroscopic superlattice. When illuminated, the whole supramolecular structure experiences a collective structural rearrangement, which could be directly visualized with a sub-nanometer resolution by scanning tunneling microscopy.

Rice University researchers have found that fracture-resistant rebar graphene is more than twice as tough as pristine graphene. While on the two-dimensional scale, graphene is stronger than steel, its extremely thin nature makes it subject to ripping and tearing. Rebar graphene is the nanoscale analog of rebar (reinforcement bars) in concrete, in which embedded steel bars enhance the material’s strength and durability. Rebar graphene, developed by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour in 2014, uses carbon nanotubes for reinforcement.

In a new study, Rice materials scientist Jun Lou, graduate student and lead author Emily Hacopian and collaborators, including Prof. James Tour, stress-tested rebar graphene and found that nanotube rebar diverted and bridged cracks that would otherwise propagate in unreinforced graphene.

Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have measured the tensile strength of centimeter-scale monolayer graphene films, using camphor - a chemical that easily volatilizes at room temperature - as a temporary support layer. The mechanical properties of monolayer graphene pieces bigger than a few micrometers have never been tested, simply because moving such an ultrathin film to a standard testing apparatus has not been possible.

In this study, camphor is used as a transient support, and what differentiates it from conventional methods is that it is sublimed away in air at room temperature naturally, or at higher temperatures for faster processing. Thanks to this method, ultrathin films with an area larger than 1 cm x 1 cm are transferred without damage, then the camphor layer disappears in the air without leaving traces. In this way, tensile measurements were made on centimeter-scale 300 nm-thick graphene oxide film specimens, almost ten times thinner than previously reported. It was also possible to work with a graphene oxide film that was only 35 nm thick, and suspend it over a 1 cm x 1 cm hole.

Haydale, the global advanced materials group, has announced that strong commercial progress has been made with an unspecified global composite materials group to enhance mechanical properties for selected products in their range of materials, through a commercially funded contract.

Over the last 12 months, Haydale has completed a series of pre-production trials for this customer (who for commercial reasons cannot be named) to enhance these selected products' mechanical performance through the incorporation of graphene in a range of world-wide industrial applications. Haydale reports that to date, it has been paid approximately $150,000 USD by the Customer for these trials.