Tag Archives: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Samsung ‘GROs’ graphene-based micro-antennas and a brief bit about the business of nanotechnology

A Feb. 22, 2013 news item on Nanowerk highlights a Samsung university grant (GRO) programme which announced funding for graphene-based micro-antennas,

The Graphene-Enabled Wireless Communication project, one of the award-winning proposals under the Samsung Global Research Outreach (GRO) programme, aims to use graphene antennas to implement wireless communication over very short distances (no more than a centimetre) with high-capacity information transmission (tens or hundreds of gigabits per second). Antennas made ??of [sic] graphene could radiate electromagnetic waves in the terahertz band and would allow for high-speed information transmission. Thanks to the unique properties of this nanomaterial, the new graphene-based antenna technology would also make it possible to manufacture antennas a thousand times smaller than those currently used.

The GRO programme—an annual call for research proposals by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (Seoul, South Korea)—has provided the UPC-led project with US$120,000 in financial support.

The Graphene-Enabled Wireless Communication project is a joint project (from the news item; Note: A link has been removed),

“Graphene-Enabled Wireless Communications” – a proposal submitted by an interdepartmental team based at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, BarcelonaTech (UPC) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)—will receive US$120,000 to develop micrometre-scale graphene antennas capable of transmitting information at a high speed over very short distances. The project will be carried out in the coming months.

The Graphene-Enabled Wireless Communication project, one of the award-winning proposals under the Samsung Global Research Outreach (GRO) programme, aims to use graphene antennas to implement wireless communication over very short distances (no more than a centimetre) with high-capacity information transmission (tens or hundreds of gigabits per second). Antennas made ??of graphene could radiate electromagnetic waves in the terahertz band and would allow for high-speed information transmission. Thanks to the unique properties of this nanomaterial, the new graphene-based antenna technology would also make it possible to manufacture antennas a thousand times smaller than those currently used.

There’s more about the Graphene-Enabled Wireless Communication project here,

 A remarkably promising application of graphene is that of Graphene-enabled Wireless Communications (GWC). GWC advocate for the use of graphene-based plasmonic antennas –graphennas, see Fig. 1- whose plasmonic effects allow them to radiate EM waves in the terahertz band (0.1 – 10 THz). Moreover, preliminary results sustain that this frequency band is up to two orders of magnitude below the optical frequencies at which metallic antennas of the same size resonate, thereby enhancing the transmission range of graphene-based antennas and lowering the requirements on the corresponding transceivers. In short, graphene enables the implementation of nano-antennas just a few micrometers in size that are not doable with traditional metallic materials.

Thanks to both the reduced size and unique radiation capabilities of ZZ, GWC may represent a breakthrough in the ultra-short range communications research area. In this project we will study the application of GWC within the scenario of off-chip communication, which includes communication between different chips of a given device, e.g. a cell phone.

A new term, graphenna, appears to be have been coined. The news item goes on to offer more detail about the project and about the number of collaborating institutions,

The first stage of the project, launched in October 2012, focuses on the theoretical foundations of wireless communications over short distances using graphene antennas. In particular, the group is analysing the behaviour of electromagnetic waves in the terahertz band for very short distances, and investigating how coding and modulation schemes can be adapted to achieve high transmission rates while maintaining low power consumption.

The group believes the main benefits of the project in the medium term will derive from its application for internal communication in multicore processors. Processors of this type have a number of sub-processors that share and execute tasks in parallel. The application of wireless communication in this area will make it possible to integrate thousands of sub-processors within a single processor, which is not feasible with current communication systems.

The results of the project will lead to an increase in the computational performance of these devices. This improvement would allow large amounts of data to be processed at very high speed, which would be very useful for streamlining data management at processing centres (“big data”) used, for example, in systems like Facebook and Google. The project, which builds on previous results obtained with the collaboration of the University of Wuppertal in Germany, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, and Georgia Tech in the United States, is expected to yield its first results in April 2013.

The project is being carried out by the NaNoNetworking Centre in Catalonia (N3Cat), a network formed at the initiative of researchers with the UPC’s departments of Electronic Engineering and Computer Architecture, together with colleagues at Georgia Tech.

Anyone interested in  Samsung’s GRO programme can find more here,

The SAMSUNG Global Research Outreach (GRO) program, open to leading universities around the world, is Samsung Electronics, Co., Ltd. & related Samsung companies (SAMSUNG)’s annual call for research proposals.

As this Samsung-funded research project is being announced, Dexter Johnson details the business failure of NanoInk in a Feb. 22, 2013 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website), Note: Links have been removed,

One of the United State’s first nanotechnology companies, NanoInk, has gone belly up, joining a host of high-profile nanotechnology-based companies that have shuttered their doors in the last 12 months: Konarka, A123 Systems and Ener1.

These other three companies were all tied to the energy markets (solar in the case of Konarka and batteries for both A123 and Ener1), which are typically volatile, with a fair number of shuttered businesses dotting their landscapes. But NanoInk is a venerable old company in comparison to these other three and is more in what could be characterized as the “picks-and-shovels” side of the nanotechnology business, microscopy tools.

Dexter goes on to provide an  analysis of the NanoInk situation which makes for some very interesting reading along with the comments—some feisty, some not—his posting has provoked.

I am juxtaposing the Samsung funding announcement with this mention of Dexter’s piece regarding a  ‘nanotechnology’ business failure in an effort to provide some balance between enthusiasm for the research and the realities of developing businesses and products based on that research.

Cement and concrete festival

Over the last week or so there’ve been a number of articles and publications about cement and concrete and nanotechnology. The Dec. 17, 2012 Nanowerk Spotlight article by (Mohammed) Shakeel Iqbal and Yashwant Mahajan for India’s Centre for Knowledge Management of Nanoscience & Technology (CKMNT, an ARCI [International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials] project, Dept.of Science & Technology) seemed to kick off the trend with a patent analysis of nanotechnology-enabled cement innovations,

China is the world leader of patent filings, their 154 patent applications contributing 41% of overall filings, representing the major and active R&D player in the area of nano-based cementitious materials. South Korea is the second leading country with 55 patents (15% of patent filings) on nano-enabled cement, closely followed by United States with 51 patents. Russia, Germany, Japan, France and India are the other leading patent filing countries with 37, 18, 11, 9 and 5 patents respectively, while the remaining patents represent a minor contribution from rest of the world.

….

Dagestan State University (Russia) is the leading assignee with 15-patents to its credit, which are mainly focussed on the development of heat resistant and high compression strength concrete materials. Halliburton Energy Services Inc (USA) comes second with 14-patents that are directed towards well bore cementing for the gas, oil or water wells using nano-cementitious materials.

This is another teaser article from the CKMNT (see my Dec. 13, 2012 posting about their bio-pharmaceutical teaser article) that highlights the findings from a forthcoming report,

A comprehensive Market Research Report on “Nanotechnology in Cement Industry” is proposed to be released by CKMNT in the near future. Interested readers may please contact Dr. Y. R. Mahajan, Technical Adviser and Editor, Nanotech Insights or Mr. H. Purushotham, Team Leader purushotham@ckmnt.com.

Regardless of one’s feelings about patents and patent systems, the article also provides a  good technology overview of the various nanomaterials used as fillers in cement, courtesy of the information in the filed patents.

A December 20, 2012 news item on Azonano points to at least of the reasons cement is occasioning research interest,

Cement production is responsible for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions. If we are to invent a “green” cement, we need to understand in more detail the legendary qualities of traditional Portland cement. A research group partly financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) is tackling this task.

The Dec. 20, 2012 Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) news release, which originated the news item on Azonano, goes on to describe the research into exactly how Portland cement’s qualities are derived,

The researchers first developed a packing model of hydrated calcium silicate nanoparticles. They then devised a method for observing their precipitation based on numerical simulations. This approach has proven successful (*). “We were able to show that the different densities on the nano scale can be explained by the packing of nanoparticles of varying sizes. At this crucial level, the result is greater material hardness than if the particles were of the same size and it corresponds to the established knowledge that, at macroscopic level, aggregates of different sizes form a harder concrete.” [said Emanuela Del Gado, SNSF professor at the Institute for Building Materials of the ETH Zurich]

Until today, all attempts to reduce or partially replace burnt calcium carbonate in the production of cement have resulted in less material hardness. By gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms at the nano level, it is possible to identify physical and chemical parameters and to improve the carbon footprint of concrete without reducing its hardness.

For those of a more technical turn of mind, here’s a citation for the paper (from the SNSF press release),

E. Masoero, E. Del Gado, R. J.-M. Pellenq, F.-J. Ulm, and S. Yip (2012). Nanostructure and Nanomechanics of Cement: Polydisperse Colloidal Packing. Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.155503

Meanwhile, there’s a technical group in Spain working on ‘biological’ concrete. From the Dec. 20, 2012 news item on ScienceDaily,

In studying this concrete, the researchers at the Structural Technology Group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya • BarcelonaTech (UPC) have focused on two cement-based materials. The first of these is conventional carbonated concrete (based on Portland cement), with which they can obtain a material with a pH of around 8. The second material is manufactured with a magnesium phosphate cement (MPC), a hydraulic conglomerate that does not require any treatment to reduce its pH, since it is slightly acidic.

On account of its quick setting properties, magnesium phosphate cement has been used in the past as a repair material. It has also been employed as a biocement in the field of medicine and dentistry, indicating that it does not have an additional environmental impact.

The innovative feature of this new (vertical multilayer) concrete is that it acts as a natural biological support for the growth and development of certain biological organisms, to be specific, certain families of microalgae, fungi, lichens and mosses.

Here’s a description of the ‘biological’ concrete and its layers,

In order to obtain the biological concrete, besides the pH, other parameters that influence the bioreceptivity of the material have been modified, such as porosity and surface roughness. The result obtained is a multilayer element in the form of a panel which, in addition to a structural layer, consists of three other layers: the first of these is a waterproofing layer situated on top of the structural layer, protecting the latter from possible damage caused by water seeping through.

The next layer is the biological layer, which supports colonisation and allows water to accumulate inside it. It acts as an internal microstructure, aiding retention and expelling moisture; since it has the capacity to capture and store rainwater, this layer facilitates the development of biological organisms.

The final layer is a discontinuous coating layer with a reverse waterproofing function. [emphasis mine] This layer permits the entry of rainwater and prevents it from escaping; in this way, the outflow of water is redirected to where it is aimed to obtain biological growth

This work is designed for a Mediterranean climate and definitely not for rain forests such as the Pacific Northwest which, climatologically, is a temperate rainforest.

The ScienceDaily news item ends with this information about future research and commercialization,

The research has led to a doctoral thesis, which Sandra Manso is writing. At present, the experimental campaign corresponding to the phase of biological growth is being conducted, and this will be completed at the UPC and the University of Ghent (Belgium). This research has received support from Antonio Gómez Bolea, a lecturer in the Faculty of Biology at the University of Barcelona, who has made contributions in the field of biological growth on construction materials.

At present, a patent is in the process of being obtained for this innovative product, and the Catalan company ESCOFET 1886 S.A., a manufacturer of concrete panels for architectural and urban furniture purposes, has already shown an interest in commercialising the material.

Almost at the same time, the US Transport Research Board (a division of the US National Research Council) released this Dec. 19, 2012 announcement about their latest circular,

TRB Transportation Research Circular E-C170: Nanotechnology in Concrete Materials: A Synopsis explore promising new research and innovations using nanotechnology that have the potential to result in improved mechanical properties, volume change properties, durability, and sustainability in concrete materials.

The report is 44 pp (PDF version) and provides an in-depth look (featuring some case studies) at the research not just of nanomaterials but also nanoelectronics and sensors as features in nanotechoology-enabled concrete and cement products.

There you have it, a festival of cement and concrete.