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:
A combination of strong and weak GO flakes can yield stronger GO paper
Researchers from Northwestern University have recently shown that graphene oxide “paper” can be made by mixing strong, solid GO flakes with weak, porous GO flakes. This finding may aid the production of higher quality GO materials, and also sheds light on a general problem in materials engineering: how to build a nano-scale material into a macroscopic material without losing its desirable properties.
Large single layers of GO wrinkle easily, leaving breakable gaps. Small, hard flakes don’t integrate well. image by Northwestern
“To put it in human terms, collaboration is very important,” said Jiaxing Huang, Northwestern Engineering professor of materials science and engineering, who led the study. “Excellent players can still make a bad team if they don’t work well together. Here, we add some seemingly weaker players and they strengthen the whole team.”
Samsung rumored to launch phone with graphene battery next year
Samsung may be in the race to develop a graphene-based alternative to lithium-ion batteries for its phones. Rumors are going around claiming that the Company hopes to have at least one phone with a graphene battery ready next year or by 2021.
The word is that these graphene-based batteries will be capable of a full charge in under a half-hour, but they still need to raise capacities while lowering costs. In 2017, Samsung said its researchers developed a "graphene ball" material that enables five times faster charging speeds than standard lithium-ion batteries.
Novel device architecture based on graphene Schottky diode varactors shows potential for optoelectronics applications
Researchers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Yale University in the U.S have reported on a novel device architecture comprising graphene Schottky diode varactors. The team assessed that such devices have great potential for optoelectronics applications.
graphically illustrated edge contact image
The team has shown that graphene varactor diodes exhibit significant advantages compared with existing graphene photodetectors, including elimination of high dark currents and enhancement of the external quantum efficiency (EQE).
Graphene and lasers enable new mass spectrometric technique
Researchers at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) have developed a graphene-based technology that can obtain high-resolution, micrometer-sized images for mass spectrometric analysis without sample preparation. DGIST Research Fellow Jae Young Kim and Chair-professor Dae Won Moon's team succeeded in developing the precise analysis and micrometer-sized imaging of bio samples using a small and inexpensive laser.
Due to its ability to obtain high-resolution mass spectrometric images without an experimental environment using a 'continuous wave laser,' the technology is expected to be applied widely in medicine and medical diagnosis fields.
STANDARD GRAPHENE implements water filtration system in Nepal
STANDARD GRAPHENE, a flake graphene producer headquartered in South Korea, recently announced the establishment of a water filtration plant at Lumbini, Nepal.
The water filtration plant reportedly uses a material called Super Graphite that has been developed from graphene manufacture technologies. The plant cleans the water through four filtration cycles, processing more than 1,000L of drinkable water per day. After multiple international tests, Super Graphite has reportedly been recognized to have a superior attraction to toxic materials and better filtration rates than conventional materials used for water filtration.