National Graphene Institute | Booth Street East | 4 fl | App

[Manc Guy]

Originally Posted by Lookin Up

.....er, what?
This isn't even fully funded yet?
Going off to Brussels with a begging bowl?
And the Koreans have been at this for 6 years already?
Graphene was actually discovered 8 years ago whilst we've (no doubt) in the meantime blabbed and wrung our hands about consultation periods and social equality impact assessments. FFS

Sounds like another great british epic fail in the making.
We really do have to pull our fingers out as a nation otherwise we're f**ked.

Well you're really the happy chappy aren't you? Consistently I'll add.

Do you ever stop moaning? About everything I mean?

[Lookin Up]

oh now now....tish tish; no need to get personal. We're all entitled to our own opinion.
We can't all think the same.
Sometimes I like stuff (say the Co-op HQ) and I'm happy to say that contrary to what you think and write.
On the other hand, when I see shit (say Premier Inn Dale St / Greengate).... also happy to point it out too. But just my opinion.
Typical Manc - say what I think.
Don't like it? - put me on ignore. No problem with that.

Overall, I just worry about our lack of ambition.
If I didn't worry, I wouldn't care.
Think about it.

[timo]

Originally Posted by Manc Guy

Well you're really the happy chappy aren't you? Consistently I'll add.

Do you ever stop moaning? About everything I mean?

He is speaking sense, though.

[js1000]

Interesting article on graphene, worth a read.

Britain’s big bet on graphene

Kostya Novoselov has the tour down pat. After a friendly introduction, visitors are whisked to a clean room so that they can repeat the experiment that helped to win him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. The important bit can be done in seconds: press some sticky tape onto a chunk of graphite, then press it again onto an ultraclean silicon wafer. Peel it off, and some of the silver flakes dotting the wafer’s surface are atom-thick sheets of honeycombed carbon known as graphene.

The material has had a meteoric rise since Novoselov, his fellow Nobel laureate Andre Geim and their team at the University of Manchester, UK, reported this deceptively simple way of making graphene1. Hundreds of groups around the world have investigated its remarkable range of properties. It is highly conductive, and exhibits a variety of quantum-mechanical behaviours that had previously been seen only in more complex materials. It is thin and flexible, and its electrical and mechanical properties change in response to its surroundings. These characteristics and others suggest various electronics applications, including touch screens, sensors and frequency generators.

Now, the UK government is hoping that Novoselov and Geim can make money from graphene. In February, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced £38 million (US$59 million) in funding for a National Graphene Institute at the university. Scheduled to open in 2015, the centre will be a hub for translating basic research into industrial applications. Researchers at Manchester will mingle with industrial scientists loaned by domestic and overseas technology firms. Spin-off companies will flourish in off-campus research parks, sparking a technology revolution in a city that was once at the centre of the Industrial Revolution. That’s the vision, at least.

The initiative has its share of critics. Some academics in the United Kingdom say that the government wants to turn campuses into money-making enterprises. Elsewhere, it is not difficult to find researchers who say that graphene’s commercial value may be overhyped. Many doubt that a single material, however promising, can revive Britain’s atrophied electronics industry.

Novoselov acknowledges these arguments, but thinks that the investment will pay off. “These millions will come back quite soon,” he says. It will certainly mean an expansion of his own research enterprise, which is currently looking at how to combine graphene with other two-dimensional materials. It will also allow companies large and small to come to the university and conduct research that might further their own industrial ambitions.

The University of Manchester is a microcosm of a global boom in graphene research (see ‘Graphene goes global’). More than 20 academics from its chemistry, biology, materials science and engineering departments participate in weekly meetings about the material. The discussions are not only about electronics: some colleagues are studying graphene for use in biosensors, and others want to incorporate it into advanced materials.

Demand for graphene from other departments has been so high that the group cannot keep up, so Branson Belle, one of Novoselov’s postdocs, launched a start-up firm in May to supply the rest of the university. Novoselov and Geim’s core group is growing too, and lab space is getting tight.

Novoselov and Geim were already asking the university for more room last year, and administrators were thinking about how to capitalize on the graphene explosion, says Nancy Rothwell, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester. The pair, together with the university and the city council, submitted a proposal to the EPSRC, which awarded the university £26 million to build the graphene institute, along with £12 million for equipment.

The funding comes at a time of austerity for UK scientists, and it has raised eyebrows in other parts of the physical-sciences community. “The institute looks great and will certainly produce outstanding science,” says Pascal André, who works on nanomaterials at the University of St Andrews, UK. But he questions the wisdom of plunging £38 million into a single subject and location when the EPSRC is slashing research budgets elsewhere. “Will the whole UK innovation of the next 5–10 years be solely based around graphene?” André asks.

Novoselov says that he agreed to the institute only after he was assured that the money would not come at the expense of research grants. Whether the government’s gambit will help the United Kingdom to compete in the global electronics market is uncertain. Britain lags behind the rest of the world in graphene patents, according to Quentin Tannock, the chairman of Cambridge IP, an independent patent consulting firm in Cambridge, UK. The country is competing with others such as South Korea, a major producer of consumer electronics, which already has a US$20-million, five-year programme to develop graphene-based display panels and other devices, according to Byung Hee Hong, a graphene researcher at Seoul National University. Hong’s group has been perfecting methods for producing sheets of graphene on an industrial scale. “I’m now working with seven different companies,” he says. But Hong adds that the strong commercial interest in Seoul may actually bode well for the new Manchester centre. “Korean companies are not working only in Korea,” he says.

“Will the whole UK innovation of the next 5–10 years be solely based around graphene?” Even if companies are curious, graphene may still flounder as a commercial product, cautions Phaedon Avouris, a materials scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. “There has been this circulating myth that graphene will replace silicon,” Avouris says. In fact, the material is not a semiconductor and lacks the necessary bandgap that would allow it to serve as a transistor — the basic element of all electronics — on its own. Avouris thinks that the material could find a use in niche markets such as high-frequency electronic devices, but he questions whether it will ever hit the big time.

Novoselov does not disagree. But, he adds, there have been enough suggested uses for graphene in different areas to make him want to look at other applications. “What I know for sure is that if we are not going to work on this, it will definitely not happen,” he says.

Novoselov has thrown himself into the project to build the graphene institute, meeting with architects and possible industrial partners on a weekly basis. Geim, who declined to be interviewed, is heavily involved too. Their group, however, is still at the cutting edge of graphene research, and is investigating the properties of layered graphene as well as other two-dimensional crystals such as boron nitride, molybdenum disulphide and niobium diselenide. Like graphene alone, the layered systems display exotic quantum behaviours and could have various applications. For example, in February, the group reported building a transistor by sandwiching boron nitride between two graphene sheets. When a voltage was applied, electrons tunnelled from one graphene sheet to the other, through the boron nitride barrier2.

“We’ve been doing good science for some time and we will do it for the years to come,” says Novoselov. But he is quick to add that now is the right time to make that science pay. “Our government is right: if we have this chance, we should take it.”

http://www.nature.com/news/britain-s...aphene-1.11124

[Marksy_1]

Not that I ususally listen to the comments on the MEN website, but one such comment says graphene has already been overtaken by another material called Molybdenite. Anybody else heard about this?

[Gerbil]

As far as I can tell, it's a similar material with similar properties. People who research Molybdenite also research Graphene.

[jrb]

Manchester University News.

a layer cake with atomic precision

15 Oct 2012

Graphene and associated one-atom-thick crystals offer the possibility of a vast range of new materials and devices by stacking individual atomic layers on top of each other, new research from The University of Manchester shows.



In a report published in Nature Physics, a group led Dr Leonid Ponomarenko and Nobel prize-winner Professor Andre Geim has assembled individual atomic layers on top of each other in a desired sequence.

The team used individual one-atom-thick crystals to construct a multilayer cake that works as a nanoscale electric transformer.

Graphene, isolated for the first time at The University of Manchester in 2004, has the potential to revolutionise diverse applications from smartphones and ultrafast broadband to drug delivery and computer chips.

It has the potential to replace existing materials, such as silicon, but the Manchester researchers believe it could truly find its place with new devices and materials yet to be invented.

In the nanoscale transformer, electrons moving in one metallic layer pull electrons in the second metallic layer by using their local electric fields. To operate on this principle, the metallic layers need to be insulated electrically from each other but separated by no more than a few interatomic distances, a giant leap from the existing nanotechnologies.

These new structures could pave the way for a new range of complex and detailed electronic and photonic devices which no other existing material could make, which include various novel architectures for transistors and detectors.

The scientists used graphene as a one-atom-thick conductive plane while just four atomic layers of boron nitride served as an electrical insulator.

The researchers started with extracting individual atomic planes from bulk graphite and boron nitride by using the same technique that led to the Nobel Prize for graphene, a single atomic layer of carbon. Then, they used advanced nanotechnology to mechanically assemble the crystallites one by one, in a Lego style, into a crystal with the desired sequence of planes.

The nano-transformer was assembled by Dr Roman Gorbachev, of The University of Manchester, who described the required skills. He said: “Every Russian and many in the West know The Tale of the Clockwork Steel Flea.

“It could only be seen through the most powerful microscope but still danced and even had tiny horseshoes. Our atomic-scale Lego perhaps is the next step of craftsmanship”.

Professor Geim added: “The work proves that complex devices with various functionalities can be constructed plane by plane with atomic precision.

“There is a whole library of atomically-thin materials. By combining them, it is possible to create principally new materials that don’t exist in nature. This avenue promises to become even more exciting than graphene itself.”

Notes for editors

The paper, Strong Coulomb drag and broken symmetry in double-layer graphene, by L Ponomarenko, R Gorbachev and A Geim, is available on request from the Press Office.

Images of graphene and more information are available at www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/.

Images illustrating this work are available from the Press Office.

For media enquiries please contact:

Daniel Cochlin
Media Relations Officer
The University of Manchester
0161 275 8387
Daniel.cochlin@manchester.ac.uk

[nq]

Photo in MCR Magazine Issue 10,

image hosted on flickr

Flickr/dullhunk Photo: Percy Dean

A couple of tenders for equipment have gone out recently, to be sited in other buildings until the NGI opens. One mentioned it would be the first quarter of 2015.

This seems to be quite an interesting collaboration agreement: http://www.graphene-flagship.eu

[jrb]

NGI. National Graphene Institue

Planning application submitted. Link to the docs under screen grabs.(best of)

101028/FO/2012/C1 | New build research facility providing cleanrooms, laboratories, academic offices and ancillary accommodation in a four storey building, incorporating basement and screened roof plant. | Site Of Former Lamb Building The University Of Manchester Booth Street East Manchester























Docs. http://www.publicaccess.manchester.g...028/FO/2012/C1

[Caiman]

[TamaSuperstar]

Very Nice

[nq]

Ha, timing. Good spot jrb.

[VDB]

That's the future there.

Now get it built and stop farting around in typical British planning style; "Oh lets listen to the uninformed NIMBYs as if their view matters". Guh.

[Cobbydaler]

Originally Posted by VDB

That's the future there.

Now get it built and stop farting around in typical British planning style; "Oh lets listen to the uninformed NIMBYs as if their view matters". Guh.

I hardly think there will be NIMBY's in Bowden Court or the surrounding non-residential University buildings...

[hifive605]

damn it, what happened to the space age black cladding design! so much better than this flat pack looking throw up!

[js1000]

Originally Posted by hifive605

damn it, what happened to the space age black cladding design! so much better than this flat pack looking throw up!

I assume this design was preferred. I'm really not sure about it. It will either look good or really shit with the random cladding and strangely-placed windows. Tempted to say the latter at this stage.

[hifive605]

sadly it looks like it gonna be another metal clad utilitarian random mish-mash with no striking form or massing - you would think the success of the co-op building would inspire something better in manc's major developments - sadly not it seems...

[VDB]

Argh, does anyone seriously care what it looks like? Just get it built and operational!

[nq]

To be honest that AFL design looked more like an office scheme, than laboratories with a serious amount of plant. Out of their listed objectives a building that is 'flexible and adaptable to future research needs' is really important here, and yes, something that can be delivered reasonably quickly.

Notice they're not fully decided on the cladding yet,

The precise choice of material, perforation pattern and density is flexible and will be explored further at the detail design stage. One option would be to use hexagonal perforations instead of the conventional circular or square versions as a subtle reference to the molecular structure of Graphene.

that would be great,

(random images pulled from Google, click for source)








(off on a tangent) what about this cladding from Make Architects




Like this bit of transparency, a view into the cleanroom in the basement, with an angled screen on which images could be projected,



Think this birds eye is worth another look, with the PVs and roof terrace.

[hifive605]

Originally Posted by VDB

Argh, does anyone seriously care what it looks like? Just get it built and operational!

sorry to point it out mate, but you've just encapsulated everything that's been wrong with British architecture for the last 50 years