Advanced Materials

A flexible display incorporating graphene in its pixels' electronics has been successfully demonstrated by the Cambridge Graphene Centre and Plastic Logic, the first time graphene has been used in a transistor-based flexible device.

LG Display is investing heavily in flexible OLED technology and is researching several different approaches to encapsulation. This profiles focuses on the hybrid approach it is taking to encapsulating its flexible devices using in-line deposition alongside the use of a barrier film.

Almost no one wants to wear more than one wrist-mounted device. In fact there has been some trend towards young people abandoning wristwatches because all those functions exist in their carried mobile phone. The trend in mobile phones has been to larger ones. The idea of that functionality being on your wrist goes completely against the trend.

Graphene 3D Lab Inc , a company developing advanced materials for 3D printing, has submitted a provisional application for a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The application is related to recent innovations in the materials and methods of 3D printable batteries.

London Graphene Limited (LGL) was established in 2013. It is a company that develops super-capacitor applications and graphene might be used in the actual supercapacitors. The first target application is in the mobile phone sector where the power requirements are low, while in the longer term they wish to also target power tools and EV.

Timesnano is a carbon nanotubes (CNT) manufacturer and the exclusive CNT provider in Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It belongs to Chengdu Organic Chemicals Co. Ltd., Chinese Academy of Sciences (COCC). The company has a production capability of 1 tpa for single-walled carbon nanotubes and 200 tpa for multi-walled CNT. Main success has so far been in the Li ion battery industry.

OLED displays are the biggest opportunity for flexible encapsulation and for that reason, IDTechEx has highlighted the most significant advances in the technology but also discusses the maturity of each of the different encapsulation approaches proposed by different developers. In a series of two articles, IDTechEx analysts discuss the significant advances witnessed in the past year towards commercialization of flexible displays and compares different technologies being developed.

IDTechEx is organizing its fifth business-focused conference and tradeshow on graphene and 2D materials in Santa Clara, CA on November 19 & 20. Graphene and 2D Materials LIVE! covers the latest technology developments, applications, commercialization progress and end user requirements for these and related materials such as carbon nanotubes.

Haydale has announced a major marketing agreement with planarTECH LLC to accelerate the commercial application of its conductive inks, graphene nanoplatelets, carbon nanotubes and other high performance nanomaterial systems.

Graphene electrodes are one of the best prospects for enabling supercapacitors and superbatteries to take up to half of the lithium-ion battery market in 15 years - amounting to tens of billions of dollars yearly.

Over the past five years there have been a large number of companies developing transparent conductive film (TCF) alternatives for ITO. Including material providers and film providers, IDTechEx have covered almost 100 organizations, working across more than 12 types of transparent conductive film technologies.

KH Chemical is a company established in 2001. It currently has 1tpa production capacity for SWCNTs (singled walled CNTs). It has 11 employees. The company was started with a capital of $3.9m USD.

SouthWest NanoTechnologies Inc has received $2.7 million in new financing in two transactions.

Supercapacitors continue to improve faster than lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries, something pointed out by Bombardier and IDTechEx some time ago. There is near consensus that commercial Li-ion batteries will not improve more than a factor of two in cost and energy density in the next decade.

OCSiAl was formed three years ago but only came out of stealth more in Q1 2014. OCSiAl has raised substantial funds and has also recently acquired Zyvex Nanotechnologies, a USA company that specialized in producing CNT composites and launched many high-profile technology demonstrators. OCSiAl is bringing to the market a carbon nanotube (CNT) offering that contains >75% SWCNT (single-walled carbon nanotubes) and is competitively priced.

Raymor Nanotech is a division of the Raymor Industries, a Canadian private company located near the Montreal area. It initially started supplying spherical titanium powdres synthesized using a plasma atomisaiton method. In 2010 it started work on single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and the titanium activity has since been acquired (dec 2013) by Arcam for a reported fee of $35 million. Raymor has also acquired NanoIntegris (operating as a subsidiary) which brings value in the post processing steps of CNT production, i.e., purifying and separating metallic and semiconducting ones.

Pyrograf Products is a spin-out manufacturing affiliate of Applied Sciences, Inc, producing and commercializing vapour grown carbon fibers (70-150 nm diameter). Pyrograf has a 30 tonne/year production capacity with approximately 25% capacity utilization.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has announced that Kamal Asadi, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, receives the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the foundation.

SouthWest NanoTechnologies manufacturer of single-wall, few-wall and multi-wall carbon nanotubes for printed electronics, energy storage and composites applications has added Ovation Polymers to its "SWeNT Certified Compounder" program for its line of SMWTM Specialty Multi-Wall Carbon Nanotubes products.

C3nano was founded in 2010, as a spin out from Prof Zhenan Bao's group at Stanford university. C3Nano has developed solution-coated, transparent, conductive materials that compete directly with indium tin oxide (ITO) and claim to have the highest conductivity with the best optical quality in the market due to their IP on AgNWs.