Graphene composites: introduction and market status

UK-based Duo Packaging has developed a graphene-enhanced polyethylene film for flexible packaging, created with the University of Manchester's Graphene Engineering Innovation Center (GEIC) and backed by the Innovation Navigator Programme. The material, branded 2DPE, uses graphene to boost the mechanical performance of polyethylene film, allowing manufacturers to use thinner, more heavily recycled plastic without losing strength or sealing performance.

Zoe Brimelow, Dale Brimelow & Mark Dickie (Image credit: Darren Robinson Photography)

In industrial trials with GEIC and live-shopping retailer QVC, the film increased material strength by up to 35% and let QVC raise the recycled content in its packaging from 45% to 60%. QVC also found the film could be heat-sealed at temperatures 15°C lower than standard film, and cut bag thickness from 30 to 28 microns, a 5% weight reduction. QVC has now switched its UK fulfilment center in Liverpool from standard autobagging film to 2DPE, a move expected to save around 50 tonnes of virgin plastic a year and cut QVC's packaging Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fees by about £21,150 (about US$27,900) annually.

First Graphene has entered a three-year Development and Commercialization Agreement with Turkish prepreg manufacturer Aeropreg to bring a PureGRAPH®-enhanced carbon fiber prepreg to market. The agreement pairs First Graphene's proprietary epoxy concentrates, developed to optimize how PureGRAPH® graphene is incorporated into resin systems, with Aeropreg's established prepreg manufacturing and in-house resin development capabilities.

Carbon fiber prepreg - fiber pre-impregnated with partially cured resin - is widely used to strengthen structural components in aerospace, defense, automotive and sporting goods applications, including primary structures in modern commercial aircraft. The agreement builds on First Graphene's existing development work incorporating PureGRAPH® into carbon fiber composites, including customer development programs and grant-funded research, and follows the Company's recent acquisition of MITO Material Solutions, which expanded its composites technology and customer base in North America.

Graphmatech has launched AROS Conductive Compounds, a line of graphene-based conductive masterbatches designed to deliver electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection and tunable conductivity in plastics using less filler than conventional carbon-based solutions, while supporting the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) sustainability goals.

Typical applications for AROS conductive compounds, including PA6 automotive parts, ESD-trays and packaging, cable jackets, automotive interior parts.

The compounds rely on an ultra-fine dispersion of graphene within the polymer matrix to build an efficient conductive network at low total carbon content. Graphmatech says a 100 wt.% masterbatch can reach a volume resistivity of 1 Ohm cm, and that adding just 5 wt.% of an AROS graphene-based masterbatch, containing less than 1 wt.% graphene, to a carbon black compound cuts volume resistivity by 10 orders of magnitude and surface resistivity by 5 orders of magnitude compared with the carbon black compound alone. ESD performance has been evaluated against the ANSI/ESD STM11.11 and STM11.12 standards, and the material is designed to work in combination with other conductive fillers such as carbon black and carbon nanotubes rather than only as a standalone replacement for them.

Researchers at Romania's National Institute for Research and Development in Microtechnologies (IMT-Bucharest), working with the "Petru Poni" Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Iasi, the Horia Hulubei National R&D Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering's Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics facility, the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest, and Hellenic Mediterranean University in Greece, have shown that adding small amounts of graphene to samarium-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Sm) nanocomposites raises dielectric conductivity by up to seven orders of magnitude, from around 10⁻⁹ S/cm for pure ZnO to 10⁻³–10⁻² S/cm at the highest graphene loadings tested.

ZnO is a widely used wide-bandgap semiconductor (~3.37 eV) valued for its thermal and chemical stability, low cost, and non-toxicity, with applications spanning optoelectronics, energy, environmental remediation, antibacterial textiles, and pharmaceuticals. Its practical use in electronic, energy, and thermoelectric applications, though, is limited by relatively low electrical conductivity stemming from a low charge-carrier concentration. Researchers have previously addressed this through doping, engineered oxygen vacancies, nanostructuring, and surface functionalization. Doping with trivalent rare-earth ions such as Sm³⁺ improves conductivity by inducing structural defects and oxygen vacancies that modulate carrier concentration, while separately, incorporating graphitic carbon into ZnO matrices has been shown to improve charge transport and suppress electron-hole recombination, given graphene's high carrier mobility, large surface area, and strong conductivity. According to the authors, combining rare-earth doping with graphene in a single ZnO system has been little studied, and no prior work had looked specifically at electrospun Sm-doped ZnO modified with low graphene loadings.

Researchers at CICATA-Legaria, the National Laboratory for Energy Conversion and Storage at Mexico's Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City, have developed a composite of pyridine-coordinated transition-metal nitroprussides and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) as a bifunctional pre-electrocatalyst for zinc-air batteries (ZABs). Testing cobalt, nickel, and copper versions of the material, the team found that each metal favors a different half of the battery's oxygen chemistry, with the cobalt variant striking the best overall balance.

Rechargeable zinc-air batteries are attractive for their high theoretical energy density, low cost, and inherent safety, but their air cathode has to drive both the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) during discharge and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) during charging, reactions with sluggish kinetics that typically require different types of catalysts. The field's benchmark catalysts, platinum for ORR and iridium or ruthenium oxides for OER, are scarce and expensive, pushing research toward cheaper first-row transition metals such as cobalt, nickel, and copper. Nitroprussides, a family of cyanometallate coordination polymers with the general formula T[Fe(CN)₅NO], offered the team a synthetically simple, structurally tunable starting point for that search.

Researchers at Walter Sisulu University in South Africa have published a comprehensive review examining graphene-metal-organic framework (MOF) composites as electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) - the two reactions that govern performance in fuel cells, metal-air batteries, and water electrolyzers.

ORR and OER are both slow, multi-electron processes, and the catalysts that currently perform them best rely on scarce, expensive noble metals - platinum for ORR, iridium and ruthenium oxides for OER. Replacing these with earth-abundant alternatives such as iron, cobalt, and nickel-based materials is seen as essential for scaling up green hydrogen production, long-duration energy storage, and zero-emission fuel cells, and graphene-MOF hybrids have emerged as one of the more promising routes to get there. Graphene contributes high electrical conductivity, a large surface area, and structural flexibility, while MOFs bring tunable porosity, abundant active sites, and a wide range of chemical functionalities - a combination the review frames as complementary rather than simply additive.

Premier Graphene, a US-based advanced materials company focused on graphene production and formulation, has announced that its affiliate HGI Industrial Technologies has formed a joint venture with Canada's Nova Graphene to develop and commercialize graphene-enabled ballistic protection products for the North American market.

Under the agreement, HGI contributes its proprietary graphene production intellectual property and manufacturing capabilities, while Nova Graphene brings its graphene materials expertise and experience developing ballistic protection technologies, including five active research contracts with Defense Research & Development Canada (DRDC), among them a $1 million Phase II project on 3D-printed body armor. The joint venture will initially target advanced personal ballistic protection systems, including Level IIIA+ and Level IV hard plates, alongside vehicle, marine and architectural ballistic protection products.

First Graphene has completed its previously announced acquisitions of US-based MITO Material Solutions and Australian materials businesses Ionic Industries and Imagine Intelligent Materials, and has separately expanded its longstanding distribution partnership with Bisley across Australia and New Zealand.

With the MITO acquisition now complete, First Graphene has received its first purchase orders from Parlor Skis and Le Croix fishing rods, customers previously supplied under the MITO brand. Former MITO chief executive Haley Marie Keith has joined First Graphene as vice president of business development, leading efforts to build product awareness and pursue commercial opportunities across the United States. The company has also submitted an application to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to supply graphene products for defense-related aerospace composite projects, and points to Keith's appointment as a foothold in the US defense industry, which it values at more than US$1.18 trillion. Having established its own US commercial channels through the MITO acquisition, First Graphene has discontinued its previous distribution arrangement with NeoGraf.

Researchers from Hebei GEO University and Shijiazhuang Tiedao University in China have developed a flexible optoelectronic memristor based on a composite of graphene oxide (GO) and perovskite quantum dots, designed to sense and process images in dimly lit conditions. 

Memristors are seen as a key building block for flexible neuromorphic vision systems. Because they can rapidly tune their resistance in response to optoelectronic inputs, they emulate the way biological synapses adjust signal weights - the behavior needed for artificial retina-like sensors that sense and compute in the same place, rather than shuttling data to a separate processor. The team, led by Jingjuan Wang and Lingzhi Tang of Hebei GEO University's College of Information Engineering, combined GO sheets with perovskite quantum dots to create a switching layer whose behavior changes markedly between dark and illuminated conditions.

NanoXplore has announced that it is launching, together with Techmer PM, a new graphene-enhanced masterbatch solution designed for high-performance plastic film applications. The new product line, branded GrapheneBlack xGnP™ Masterbatch, targets film manufacturers looking to improve mechanical performance and sustainability in flexible packaging.

According to the companies, the graphene-enhanced films can achieve more than 70% improvement in key mechanical properties compared to conventional formulations at similar thickness. They also report that the technology can enable up to 20% downgauging (thickness reduction) while maintaining required tensile, tear, and puncture performance, potentially reducing material consumption and overall film weight.