Fei Guo Ph.D. ’12 Receives Brian Kelly Award

Brown University School of Engineering postdoctoral researcher Fei Guo Ph.D. ’12 was presented the Brian Kelly Award at Carbon 2012, the annual world conference on carbon in Krakow, Poland, on June 21. Guo, who was advised by Professor Bob Hurt at Brown, delivered a 30-minute award lecture, “Graphene-Based Environmental Barriers,” to the conference participants.

In his presentation, Guo demonstrated the potential for graphene oxide films to act as high-performance barriers for environmental toxicants. Applying elemental mercury (considered a neurotoxic) as a model, he showed that just 20 nm graphene oxide films, which were deposited onto surface treated polymers, reduced mercury permeability by 90%.

This prestigious annual award was established in 1996 by the British Carbon Group in memory of Brian Kelly, a leading authority on the physics of graphite to reward excellence in carbon science and technology. The award is currently five hundred pounds sterling (£500) and was presented at the time of the conference with a certificate. The award is intended as a travel grant for students and early career researchers with up to ten years postdoctoral experience to attend the annual World Carbon Conference.

Simple method could aid in medical imaging, chemotherapy

Researchers, led by Robert Hurt, professor of engineering, have found that a simple technique can swathe nanoparticles with a blanket of graphene, which could carry medical imaging contrast agents, allowing the nanoparticles to enhance imaging signals while shielding tissue from their potential toxic effects. They could also deliver chemotherapy drugs to tumors.

Full report online: cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/04/Graphene-Envelops-Nanoparticles.html

Full paper: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nl2045952

Brown University School of Engineering professor Vivek Shenoy's work on thermal transport across grain boundaries in graphene (published in Nano Letters last month) has also been featured in the research highlights section of Nature Materials. An abstract of his paper, "Thermal transport across Twin Grain Boundaries in Polycrystalline Graphene from Nonequilibrium Molecular Dynamics Simulations" follows:

Heat at the borders

Fabio Pulizzi

Nature Materials

 

10,

 

724

 

(2011)

Published online

 

23 September 2011

Nano Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nl202118d (2011)

Graphene exhibits the highest thermal conductivity ever observed. Its thermal transport has been studied theoretically and experimentally, mostly in single-crystalline graphene. Unfortunately, large-scale growth, for example by chemical vapour deposition (CVD), usually yields polycrystalline sheets. Akbar Bagri and colleagues have performed molecular dynamic simulations of the thermal transport across various grain boundary orientations in graphene. They assumed a constant heat flow through the material, calculated the temperature profile and from that estimated the thermal conductivity. Interestingly, they found abrupt jumps in the temperature at the grain boundaries, which depend on the boundary orientation and grain size. The estimated grain boundary thermal conductivity is much higher than in the case of other materials with high thermal conductivity, such as nanocrystalline diamond. The results are particularly important in view of potential applications based on CVD-grown graphene. It will be interesting to see how the experiments will compare with these predictions.


For the full html version from NanoLetters, please go to:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nl202118d