Specialty chemicals company Mito Material Solutions and Cardea Bio recently announced significant progress in the international efforts to standardize graphene together with the National Institute of Standards (NIST). Brett Goldsmith, PhD, chief technology officer (CTO) at Cardea, recently returned from the International Standards Organization (ISO) meeting that took place at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), during which graphene material documentary standards reportedly took important steps forward.
“We see a bright future for diagnostic tools based on graphene electronics, but we’re not waiting for that future — we’re making it happen!” Goldsmith says. “Part of that means driving reliability and predictability in the graphene material industry. That’s why we are committed to supporting the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO TC 229.”
Standardization expertise is supported by staff on NIST’s graphene technical specification team, including senior scientist Dr. Angela Hight Walker. “Graphene will play a major role in multiple industries; developing documentary standards will certainly hasten the pace,” Dr. Walker says. “Leadership by U.S. industry in developing standards is critical for emerging technologies. Having U.S. companies like Mito Materials and Cardea spearhead standards discussions indicates a new threshold of maturity for the U.S.-based graphene industry.”
Titled “The classification framework for graphene-related 2D materials,” the document will move from a preliminary work item to a formal technical specification project as early as spring 2023.
Leading the effort to draft this technical specification is Caio Lo Sardo, vice president of Mito. “Our flagship product, E-GO, is an additive used in materials like fiber-reinforced thermoplastics and thermosets to improve performance in composite applications across several industries,” Lo Sardo points out. “For us to serve growing markets, we need to deliver increasing quantities of materials while also meeting EPA/TSCA registration requirements. As a graphene consumer, we need to be able to ensure that the materials we use are within specs, [are] consistent and meet regulatory standards.”
ISO Technical Committee (TC) 229 focuses on nanotechnologies. The group of people working on graphene standards in this committee includes a mix of industry, academia and government lab scientists with a variety of technical backgrounds and perspectives, working as part of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-Accredited U.S., TAG to ISO TC 229. These varied perspectives have combined to create a unified draft technical specification that is expected to help drive the commercialization of products that contain graphene by giving industry tools to help separate hype from reality.