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William Blythe became corporate members of The Graphene Council in August 2016 as part of their ongoing research into graphene oxide. As the world’s largest community of graphene professionals, The Graphene Council works with experts worldwide to support the commercialisation of graphene materials.

Since launching graphene oxide as a commercial product via the GOgraphene webshop just over a year ago, William Blythe has worked to actively engage with the wider graphene community through several platforms, including opportunities presented via The Graphene Council. The team at William Blythe maintain an active calendar of graphene related events around the world, details of upcoming events can be found on the William Blythe website.

If you have any questions regarding the ongoing graphene oxide work taking place at William Blythe, or if you have any questions related to the products available on our GOgraphene webshop, please get in touch and a member of the team will be happy to help.

According to independent research, the global market for water filtration and purification membranes is estimated to be worth more than US$25bn. Given the potential for graphene oxide in water filtration, it is therefore unsurprising that significant academic research has taken place into graphene oxide membranes.

A key challenge when moving from academic research to commercial products involves ensuring the technology is scalable. G2O, a UK based graphene innovation company, has developed and patented graphene oxide membrane filtration technology and will be leading a £1m project to scale the technology over the next two years. The project includes a number of UK companies working on different aspects of the scale up. William Blythe is proud to announce that they will be working on this project as the graphene oxide material developer and supplier, optimising their graphene oxide for G2O’s membrane filters. Described as “an essential new technology capable of providing contaminant-free water in a cost-effective way for people in the developing world”, William Blythe are looking forward to working collaboratively on this project over the next two years.

If you have any questions about William Blythe's graphene oxide research, please get in touch.

The increased activity around graphene related research has risen dramatically over the last decade. As a result, there is a full calendar of events each year, offering opportunities to learn more about recent material developments, new application based research and find how the industry is both growing and evolving. William Blythe attend a wide range of events globally, with a recent rise in event attendance connected to their work on graphene oxide.

A recent event held at Cranfield University proved to be a very interesting two days, with academia and industry meeting to discuss the recent developments in graphene materials and where future resources should focus in order to develop commercial applications for these materials. William Blythe had the opportunity to present at this event, and the company scale up plans for graphene oxide were well received. A number of companies were also particularly interested in William Blythe’s intentions to work collaboratively with customers to develop application specific grades of graphene oxide. If you are interested in a product which falls outside of our standard products, please let us know as we do have experience in developing new grades of graphene oxide by customer request.

Over the coming months, William Blythe have planned attendance at the UK KTN Special Interest Groups for 2D Materials, attendance at the Graphene New Materials Conference in Cambridge and IDTechEx in Santa Clara. If you would like to arrange a meeting with a member of the William Blythe team at any of these events, please get in touch.

Polyoxometalates, or POMs, is the name given to polynuclear materials which contain transition metals and oxygen. They have been researched for a diverse range of applications, including photochemistry and energy storage. The most popular research area to date for POMs has been catalysis, where their redox properties and strong Brønsted acidity are utilised. The biggest problems with POMs include difficulty of separation and the poor availability of active sites. Support materials for POMs have therefore been of great interest within the scientific community as they may offer a simultaneous solution to both problems.

Many support materials have been researched for this purpose, with silica and polymers common choices. Graphene oxide is also of interest in this research area due to its high surface area and its ease of dispersion in a number of solvents. Accordingly, a recent paper published in Materials Chemistry and Physics focused on supporting polyoxometalates on graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide for catalyst applications. The researchers discovered that there were three important parameters to control the adsorption; the presence of oxygen functional groups, the pH and the solvent were all key to achieving the highest possible adsorption capacity.

The research compared the ability of graphene oxide and two reduced graphene oxides, which had different oxygen contents. The highest adsorption capacity achieved by the research was 427 mg/g, which was achieved by graphene oxide. This indicates that a higher oxygen content is preferable when aiming for high adsorption capacities.
This paper is another example of the breadth of research which graphene oxide is currently being used in. If you have any questions about how your research could benefit from graphene oxide, please get in touch.

Mater. Chem. Phys., 2017, 299, 424

The UK Government recently announced that new funding will be available for research around clean and flexible energy. Termed the ‘Faraday Challenge’, the funding has been described as “an investment of £246 million over 4 years to help UK businesses seize the opportunities presented by the transition to a low carbon economy, to ensure the UK leads the world in the design, development and manufacture of batteries for the electrification of vehicles”. While research included within this brief will be diverse, looking at all aspects of a battery and manufacturing processes, the question of whether graphene and related materials will find a home in this competition has come up many times already.

Research around graphene and graphene oxide in battery applications is wide ranging, with the materials most frequently considered for use in the electrodes, often as composites. The two-dimensional nature of these materials can be exploited to achieve high surface area materials, often enhancing the performance of existing materials. The possibilities are not limited to the electrodes though, graphene oxide has a broad range of properties which could be exploited in future generations of batteries. One potential example would be the continued use of these materials in composites, used to increase the mechanical strength of polymers. Improvements in this area could be employed in new housing for batteries, to increase the safety of the driver if the battery pack was impacted during a traffic accident.

The possibilities for graphene oxide in future generations of batteries is diverse, with opportunities presented in many aspects of the global transition into mainstream hybrid and electric vehicles. William Blythe has participated in Innovate UK funding previously and had an active interest in projects related to energy storage – with and without the inclusion of graphene oxide. If you have a project you would like to work on with William Blythe, please get in touch.