The Graphene-Info newsletter (January 24, 2023)

Researchers from China's Xi’an Polytechnic University, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences CAS) and Shaanxi Textile Research Institute have found that breathable electrodes woven into fabric used in fire suits have proven to be stable at temperatures over 520ºC. At these temperatures, the fabric is found to be essentially non-combustible with high rates of thermal protection time at the maximum values recorded so far for such technology at 18.91 seconds.

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The results show the efficacy and practicality of Janus graphene/poly(p-phenylene benzobisoxazole), or PBO, woven fabric in making firefighting “smarter”, with aims to manufacture products on an industrial scale that are flame-retardant but also intelligent enough to warn the firefighter of increased risks while facing flames.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) houses a room-sized electromechanical machine called the NIST-4 Kibble balance. The instrument can already measure the mass of objects of roughly 1 kilogram as accurately as any device in the world. But now, NIST researchers have used graphene to further improved their Kibble balance’s performance by adding to it a custom-built device that provides an exact definition of electrical resistance.

The device is called the quantum Hall array resistance standard (QHARS), and it consists of a set of several smaller devices that use a quirk of quantum physics to generate extremely precise amounts of electrical resistance. The improvement should help scientists use their balances to measure masses smaller than 1 kilogram with high accuracy, something no other Kibble balance has done before.

Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and Toshiba Corporation recently demonstrated how graphene-based olfactory sensors could detect odor molecules depending on the design of peptide sequences. They showed that graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs) functionalized with designable peptides could be utilized to develop electronic devices that imitate olfactory receptors and then emulate the sense of smell by selectively detecting odor molecules.

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Olfactory sensing is an integral part of many industries like food, cosmetics, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. Currently, most commonly utilized methods for detecting and evaluating odor molecules is called gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS). While GC–MS is effective, it has certain limitations like confined sensitivity and heavy setup. As a result, researchers are in the search of user-friendly and highly sensitive alternatives.

Liquid metal catalysts have recently been attracting attention for synthesizing high-quality 2D materials facilitated via the catalysts’ perfectly smooth surface. However, the microscopic catalytic processes occurring at the surface are still largely unclear because liquid metals escape the accessibility of traditional experimental and computational surface science approaches. 

An EU-funded collaboration of researchers that included teams from Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, The European Synchrotron- ESRF, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Aarhus University,  Leiden University and Université Grenoble Alpes used novel in situ and in silico techniques to achieve an atomic-level characterization of the graphene adsorption height above liquid Cu, reaching quantitative agreement within 0.1 Å between experiment and theory.