A busy week for four carbon bonds

Where graphene hits the headlines, and other nooks and crannies

Another week, and more news of weird stuff that four carbon bonds can get up to when they get properly organised. Over on the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) Materials group they write about Hybrid graphene flame retardants in epoxy improve fire and high temperature performance. Apart from the fact that it is yet another use of our wonder material, the interesting bit is the source of the work. As the KTN write up puts it “Lei Song from University of Science and Technology of China used an in-situ sol-gel process to make organic-inorganic hybrid flame retardants.” The item has a link to the paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, which you’ll have to pay for.
The China connection is just another sign of the attention that the local research community is lavishing on us. Of 614 papers that mention graphene in a random selection of publications retrieved over the past decade from the IoPP’s fine library 88 mention the “People’s Republic of China”.

Boiling under

Always nice to see someone finding a new use for graphene, as in another paper from Nature Scientific Reports. Here’s another one with a safety angle. A Novel Role of Three Dimensional Graphene Foam to Prevent Heater Failure during Boiling, describes “a novel boiling heat transfer in reduced graphene oxide suspended in water near critical heat flux, which is traditionally the dangerous limitation of nucleate boiling heat transfer because of heater failure”. The writers claim that this phenomenon “would provide the safer margin of the heat transfer and the amazing impact on the thermal system as the first report of graphene application”. The bottom line, they say, is that “This novel boiling phenomenon can effectively prevent heater failure because of the role played by the self-assembled three-dimensional foam-like graphene network.”

Strong stuff

Even engineers of a decidedly mucky nature are muscling in on graphene. Those fine observers of everything manufacturing over at The Manufacturer have found a story from Columbia University. Following the trail we get to the original item “Even with Defects, Graphene Is Strongest Material in the World”. This then leads us to a paper in Science where the more prosaic title “High-Strength Chemical-Vapor–Deposited Graphene and Grain Boundaries” explains why The Manufacturer liked the item. The paper tells us that even graphene of a less than pristine nature – “polycrystalline and thus contain grain boundaries” – is still strong stuff, as strong as the scientifically pure graphene so long as “post-processing steps avoid damage or rippling”.

Elephant memory

We’ve been here before it seems. The latest Columbia paper is a follow up to a five-year old publication from the same group that gave us the press release “Columbia Engineers Prove Graphene is Strongest Material”. It was this release that arrived with the quote from James Hone “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.” (This is believed to be a local reference to what Brits might call ‘clingfilm’.)

Apple files patent

The newshounds over at New Scientist spotted a patent application from Apple that could see graphene in heat sinks for portable electronic devices. The patent’s claims include:

“A method for facilitating the use of a portable electronic device, comprising-  arranging a set of components and a battery within an enclosure of the portable electronic device; disposing a heat dissipator comprising graphene over a surface of the battery; and providing thermal contact between one or more of the components and the heat dissipator.”

Few patents make it into production. If this one does, will Apple pay taxes on anything that comes from this invention?

Electrodes on the brain

Nanotechnology, the journal, has a more substantial offering on graphene in electronics in The application of graphene as electrodes in electrical and optical devices. With all of the authors working in Korea, where they make electronic stuff by the container load, there’s a better chance that this work, a review of activity in the area, will see light of day. Clearly people are reading this paper: published last year, when we last looked it was number two in the list on the journal’s home page of papers “most read” in the past 30 days.

Makes you wonder

Hard to know what to make of this “case study” from EPSRC. no doubt about the subject The wonder stuff but the PDF says no more than the minimal text on the page. there isn’t even a live link to the people the page describes. So we had to get Google to take us to Durham Graphene Science. It turns out to be a spinout from Durham University that has “developed a novel process for the manufacture of high specification graphene”. Smart move: in the early days any money to be made from graphene will go to people making the stuff and selling kit to the research community. Not much in the way of news since 2011 though.

A sort of battery

Spinouts are de rigeur for enterprising academics these days. Indeed, it looks like our four carbon bonds have sparked off a new business sector, the graphene battery. There is even a new company out there exploiting their tricks. Graphene Batteries, based in Oslo, “is engaged in development of safe and durable graphene based high energy battery materials”. The idea is to assemble “a key technology IP-portfolio for future licensing and production”.
Another company with a finger in the battery business is Lomiko Metals Inc. Lomiko, which has its own graphite mines, recently put out a press release on a collaboration with the Research Foundation of Stony Brook University and Graphene Laboratories, Inc. “to investigate novel, energy-focused applications for graphene” with a specific mention of batteries. The release tells us that “the goal of this collaboration is to map commercially viable routes for the fabrication of graphene-based energy storage devices”.
Graphene Laboratories, based on Long Island, New York, describes itself as “a world leading manufacturer and supplier of graphene products to R&D markets”. So the business reflects the level of maturity, or lack of it, of the graphene market. Perhaps it won’t be long before R&D becomes R, D & D (that’s research, development and demonstration) with the usual order-of-magnitude rise in the costs of projects.

In the picture

There’s another patent application in the works (see Apple above) for a neat use of our slithery carbon bonds, this time from a university group. Laser Focus World tells us that over at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore Assistant Professor Wang Qijie has come up with a graphene based image sensor that will allow cameras “to take clear and sharp photos in dim conditions”. The NYU press release optimistically proclaims that we’ll see this development “soon”. The trick was to “create nanostructures on graphene which will “trap” light-generated electron particles for a much longer time, resulting in a much stronger electric signal”.

Professor Wang Qijie slides on graphene that can see in the dark

How facile can you get?

It is always entertaining trying to work out just what the titles of papers mean when they give us a plug. Here’s one that provokes several lines of thought “Facile, scalable synthesis of edge-halogenated graphene nanoplatelets as efficient metal-free eletrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction”. It comes from Nature Scientific Reports which, as an open access journal, is free for all to read and ponder.
The journal is a regular source of papers about graphene. Here’s one with an intriguing title Highly Sensitive and Selective Gas Sensor Using Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Graphenes. This time you can see that we are into sensor territory. Oh, yes, the paper’s authors are in Korea.

EuroGRAPHENE’s final fling

They have been thinking about graphene in Strasbourg, where the European Science Foundation (ESF) put together EuroGRAPHENE, “the first coordinated European-wide cooperation on graphene science and technology”. The programme ends this year so the ESF has put together a report on Scientific Highlights (a 2.7 MB PDF file that you can shrink to half that size with the right software!). It lists seven Collaborative Research Projects carried out all over Europe. Well most of Europe, not much in there from the UK.

Far from weak ending

The IoPP rounds up a working week of papers with another interesting title Direct writing on graphene 'paper' by manipulating electrons as 'invisible ink. Again, the source is the journal

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, with authors from the Department of Energy Conversion and Storage at the Technical University of Denmark, and Beijing Key Laboratory of Green Chemical Reaction Engineering and Technology at Tsinghua University.
As the abstract puts it “The combination of self-assembly (bottom up) and nano-imprint lithography (top down) is an efficient and effective way to record information at the nanoscale by writing.” The researchers say that they achieved “Direct high precision microscopic writing on graphene … through an EDX line scan with 1 nm probe in STEM mode”. They sum up their achievements with the observation “These results not only shed new light on an application of graphene concerning the interaction of different forms of carbon but also illuminate the interaction of forms of carbon through an electron beam.”
This is just one of a batch of four papers in the journal. Also check out Control of density and LSPR of Au nanoparticles on graphene, Intrinsic loss due to unstable modes in graphene and Control of density and LSPR of Au nanoparticles on graphene.

Technorati Tags: graphene,displays,Korea,China,carbon

Shale of the century shifts carbon consumption

The rise of shale gas in the US has had unexpected consequences as well as the more obvious effects. It was bound to do wonders for local energy prices, but who would have thought that it would play a part in increasing Germany’s emissions of carbon dioxide? 

You can get an idea of shale’s impact on energy markets from a new paper from Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In US Energy: the New Reality John Mitchell reviews recent changes in the energy scene in the US. He shows just how quickly those changes have happened. In 2006, natural gas production in the US reached a low of 18 trillion cubic feet (tcf). (They still use 19th century measurement units there.) By 2012 it had risen by a third to 24 tcf.

The gains for the US are obvious. “Low natural gas prices have expanded the domestic gas market and enhanced the competitiveness of US industries,” says Mitchell. And this will be a long-term effect. Gas-based petrochemical and electricity-intensive industries in the United States “will continue to benefit from cost advantages that are beginning to approach those enjoyed by Middle East petrochemicals industries with oil-related (though discounted) input costs”.

This industrial benefit is in contrast to the UK where last week Sir Alan Rudge, in his farewell address as President of the ERA Foundation, complained that “we are struggling with a disastrous expensive energy policy that is based upon an illusion of a green economy with a huge dependence on imports”. Sir Alan, who has been banging on for some time about the price that industry in the UK has to pay for its energy, lusts after the US’s shale gas. This has, he says, “already reduced energy costs there by a staggering 40 per cent, made them a net exporter of gas, and commenced the rejuvenation of productive industry”.

One consequence of the shale bonanza is, as Sir Alan said, that it has “significantly reduced [CO2] emissions in the USA”. That is because shale gas has half the CO2 content of coal.
This switch from coal to gas in the US has not brought about the dent in CO2 emissions that you might think. It has just exported the carbon for other people to chuck into the atmosphere. One recipient of this carbon looking for a home is Germany.

Mitchell explains what has happened in his paper. Natural gas companies, he points out, have increased their share of the US electricity market by 5 per cent. And it has done this “partly at the expense of coal (which has lost 3 per cent of the electricity generation market)”.

Coal producers haven’t thrown away their picks and shovels and gone on to greener pursuits. They have replaced this loss of domestic sales “by exporting to growing markets in the power sector in Asia and in Europe (the latter reflecting the phasing-out of nuclear power in Germany)”.

So, all those German environmentalists saying no to nuclear power have been bad news for climate change. Yes, Germany is bigger in renewable energy than the rest of Europe, but it still needs to keep the lights on.

A far from green bamboo computer

How one company’s plans to make a green computer caused a headache for the recyclers.

When the computer company Dell wanted to “go green” it alighted on “bamboo” as a neat environmentally friendly material. Had Dell stuck to what it called" “Nature’s Eco-friendly Packaging Solution” for the boxes that keep hardware safe during transit there might have been no complaints. After all, as it proclaimed, you can just “Toss that Bamboo Packaging into the Compost Pile”.

Unfortunately, the company’s designers didn’t stop there. In 2008, they launched what Dell called an “eco computer”, with a case made out of a bamboo based material that looks and behaves just like the ABS polymers used in other computers. You can’t just add that to your vegetable waste and throw it on the compost heap.

Nat Hunter, co-director for Design at the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), tells of going to a recycling plant in Kent. The plant takes old PCs and subjects them to “big rock crushers” – a wrecking ball – to reduce the obsolete computers to piles of rubble, a materials mine.

The waste then goes through sorting line to separate out the different materials for recycling. Unfortunately, Hunter explained at a recent meeting, the sorting system cannot tell the difference between the bamboo plastic and ordinary ABS plastic and shoves it into the same receptacle, thus polluting the real polymer waste.

As Hunter says, the bamboo PC completely failed in its attempts to be ‘eco friendly’. You buy it as a green computer but it ends up being "very problematic" for the recycling industry.

Hunter was talking about Dell’s foray into panda territory at a meeting put on by, among others, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). The meeting, back in January, marked publication of a POST Note Maximising the Value of Recycled Materials. Much of the event – more details here in a piece I wrote for the Materials Research Society in the USA – dealt with the business of recycling plastic, which often entails sorting a pile of mixed polymers, an increasingly sophisticated task made more difficult if the mixture harbours a polymer that masquerades as something else.

Hunter, who is a part of the team behind The Great Recovery – Redesigning the future, a project funded by the Technology Strategy Board, tackled a broader theme, designing manufactured goods to be green from the start. She takes the line that “waste really is a design flaw”.

Designers need to put a lot more effort into thinking about the fate of their products. Dell isn’t the only electronics company in her sights. Hunter, who has spent time watching the recyclers in action, also tells the tale of TVs from Philips that comes with 300 screws holding it together, “all of them different”. By contrast, Samsung makes TVs with half as many screws, all of them the same. Much easier to dismantle.

What have academics ever done for us?

Is seems that academics can never do anything right, especially when it comes to their work with businesses. Companies complain that university “boffins” don’t want to know about the sort of science that makes money, and when they do show interest in how businesses work, they are dismissed for being out of touch.

The latest manifestation of the latter complaint shows in the responses to a news item on Times Higher Education (THE), Business schools unveil plans for enterprise research centre. The story itself is a straightforward report of plans by Warwick Business School and Aston Business School to set up a Enterprise Research Centre.

The announcement was one of a PR binge that the government went on to mark Global Entrepreneurship Week, in a desperate attempt to appear to be doing something about business. Aston University, in its announcement of the initiative, says “The new £2.9 million centre will become a national and international focal point for research, knowledge and expertise on small and medium-sized businesses.” What possible objection could there be to that?

Back at the THE, ‘whatalife’ whines “I do find these ‘setting up’ of Business Schools to encourage enterprise very amusing. The vast amount of academics could not run their own weekly shopping budget and yet they try to tell business men how to run a business.” Then we get another comment from yet another person who does not want to reveal their real identity, ‘John’, who adds “Coming from the industry, I wonder whether these academics from business school know about real world business at all, let alone doing research in this area.”

I wonder if any of the business people who slagged off business schools on the THE site have actually read any papers based on the academics' research. I regularly read and write about papers about R&D management, for example. While these publications rarely deliver staggering intellectual insights, they are much better than all those expensive consultants when it comes to providing details of what they have done and in analysing their material. They are certainly superior to the ‘make it up as you go along’ style of management that has brought many British companies to their knees.

You won’t read papers from commercial consultants, unlike academic who consult on the back of their research. The ‘borrow your watch to tell you the time’ brigade don't dare reveal their sources, lest the audience see that there is nothing there. Just read the bland articles that many commercial consultancies put on their websites.

Jibes about academics' inability to manage their shopping seem to fall into the trap of thinking that understanding something is the same as doing it. Academics understand how water flows through pipes – it is called fluid dynamics – but no one expects them to be great plumbers.

The independence of academics – and perhaps the fact that their primary motivation is not to re-package old ideas in the mode of some commercial consultants – means that they are free to talk at great length to many many managers, far more than a practitioner can hope to reach without shirking on their paid work.

Academics also have the advantage that they are not in competition with the businesses they study. Companies will say things to academic researchers that they would never put on the record and would certainly not say in front of a rival. As a result, academics are more likely to have a better understanding of what goes on in the business world than many of the wonderful managers who have been so successful in recent years.

Unlike, it seems, these critics, I have read papers from both Warwick Business School and Aston Business School. They have interesting things to say and have worked with some of the more successful business around. Putting the two together in this way makes sense, not least because they sit in the middle of an industrial hotspot, stuffed with just the sort of businesses that the Enterprise Research Centre will study.

I have no idea if business schools are any good at training managers, although there is evidence to suggest that they are not a complete waste of time. I wouldn't be surprised if they are less than great. But that isn't what the new centre is all about.

A not so snappy camera seller

Retailers succeed or fail on the strength of their communication with customers.

With my now very old, all of four years, digital Canon PowerShot 1000is on the way out, I thought it would be a good idea to move on a couple of generations for my next point-and-shoot camera. A sucker for Canon even before the company flew me to Japan on a couple of press tours, where I saw the quality of its technology close up, I found a likely candidate in the new PowerShot SX260. Nice looking camera with an impressive zoom range.

Looking around, I could see that Amazon and Jessops have similar

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prices, when you factor in Canon’s cashback deal. I dropped into Jessops on The Strand to see what it looked like. Satisfied that it would fit into a pocket, and good enough to let me leave the Canon SLR at home, after checking that my favourite supplier, Park Cameras in Burgess Hill, could not hope to match the on-line prices, I decided to order from Jessops on the grounds that while the company might be a little bit dearer, unlike Amazon, it does not refuse to pay corporation taxes in the UK.

Jessops had the item in stock. So, order placed on Sunday. Would you believe it? “In stock” for “next day delivery” suddenly turned out to be a myth.

On Monday the camera magically turned out to be “On Back-Order” with the promise of a 10-day wait, making it a bit tight before I am go off on holiday at the end of the month.

This did not stop Jessops from despatching a pair of spare batteries to go with the non-existent camera, despite the fact that they are pointless on their own. But what about getting the camera itself?

Jessops, it seems, does not believe in communicating with customers. No email to say that delivery is delayed. No suggestion as to how long it might really take. Just a message about sending the useless batteries.

OK, give them the benefit of the doubt. Use their web system to ask about changing the order from delivery to the much touted shop collection – Jessops’s system suggests that it is in stock at a couple of shops near me. Unfortunately, the promised “response within 24 hours” turns out to be a myth. The next move is to try to cancel the order to see if that will get some sort of response.

Communication is what sets suppliers apart. Customers don’t mind the odd hiccup if they know what is going on. Jessops fails on that front. So, corporation tax or not, it isn’t likely to get my business in future. Pity, the assistants in the store on The Strand were friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. They are just let down by the systems that are supposed to support their efforts.

Update – While writing this I finally received a reply. Not a solution, or any suggestion as to when new stock might arrive. But at least a reply. Maybe the solution will happen tomorrow.