Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like pattern. Graphene is considered to be the world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material - to both electricity and heat. All this properties are exciting researchers and businesses around the world - as graphene has the potential the revolutionize entire industries - in the fields of electricity, conductivity, energy generation, batteries, sensors and more.
Mechanical strength
Graphene is the world's strongest material, and so can be used to enhance the strength of other materials. Dozens of researches have demonstrated that adding even a trade amount of graphene to plastics, metals or other materials can make these materials much stronger - or lighter (as you can use less amount of material to achieve the same strength).
Such graphene-enhanced composite materials can find uses in aerospace, building materials, mobile devices, and many other applications.
Thermal applications
Graphene is the world's most conductive material to heat. As graphene is also strong and light, it means that it is a great material to make heat-spreading solutions, such as heat sinks. This could be useful in both microelectronics (for example to make LED lighting more efficient and longer lasting) and also in larger applications - for example thermal foils for mobile devices.
Energy storage
Because graphene is the world's thinnest material, it is also the material with the highest surface-area to volume ratio. This makes graphene a very promising material to be used in batteries and supercapacitors. Graphene may enable devices that can store more energy - and charge faster, too. Graphene can also be used to enhance fuel-cells.
Coatings ,sensors, electronics and more
Graphene has a lot of other promising applications: anti-corrosion coatings and paints, efficient and precise sensors, faster and efficient electronics, flexible displays, efficient solar panels, faster DNA sequencing, drug delivery, and more.
Graphene is such a great and basic building block that it seems that any industry can benefit from this new material. Time will tell where graphene will indeed make an impact - or whether other new materials will be more suitable.
The latest Graphene Application news:
Graphene-enhanced E-skin generates and stores electricity for prosthetic devices
Researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have developed an electronic “skin” that can generate and store electricity for prosthetic devices.
The technology consists of layers of a finely tuned graphite-polyurethane composite covered by graphene. The team explained that the graphite-polyurethane works as an electric supercapacitor, storing energy that can be used at any time by a prosthetic. The graphene component is said to essentially be a solar panel that converts sunlight to electricity to charge the supercapacitor.
Urbix Resources to build a purification plant in Vietnam
Aiming to ramp up their international operations, Urbix Resources will reportedly work with Hanoi-based Vietnam Graphite Group to build a 70,000 tonne purification plant in Vietnam. The Vietnamese purification plant will be situated within VGG’s graphite mining operations in North Western Vietnam and will serve customers in Japan and the surrounding region.
The facility is scheduled for stage one completion in late 2020. It is anticipated the purification plant will have the capability of achieving revenues exceeding US $200 million annually once the second stage is completed the following year. It appears that the plant will be used to produce, among other materials, graphene oxide and graphene nanoplatelets.
Haydale takes part in collaborative SMART Expertise Program
Haydale is working alongside Swansea University, GTS Flexibles, Alliance Labels, Tectonic International, ScreenTec, Alliance Labels, Malvern Panalytical and the English Institute of Sport on a Welsh Government SMART Expertise program.
The program, funded by the Welsh Government as part of its European Development Fund, is intended to benefit industry in Wales through the development of new concepts and advanced functionalized inks using Haydale’s advanced materials.
Rice and BGU present a range of exciting new graphene-enhanced composite materials
The labs of Rice University chemist James Tour and Christopher Arnusch, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, introduced a batch of graphene-enhanced composites that can be a step towards more robust packages.
By infusing laser-induced graphene with plastic, rubber, cement, wax or other materials, the lab made composites with a wide range of possible applications. These new composites could be used in wearable electronics, in heat therapy, in water treatment, in anti-icing and deicing work, in creating antimicrobial surfaces and even in making resistive random-access memory devices.
LifeSaver and NGI to collaborate on graphene-enhanced water filtration system
LifeSaver, a UK-based manufacturer of portable and reusable water filtration systems, has announced an exclusive contract with the National Graphene Institute (NGI) at The University of Manchester.
The 18-month research project will focus on developing graphene technology that can be used for enhanced water filtration, with the goal of creating a proprietary and patented, cutting-edge product capable of eliminating an even wider range of hazardous contaminants than currently removed by its existing high-performance ultra-filtration process.
