Graphene production

NanoXplore has announced the completion of the commissioning of its state-of-the-art 4,000 metric tons/year commercial graphene capacity facility in Montreal, Province of Quebec.

NanoXplore’s new graphene facility is a fully automated production plant that enables a connected, flexible and continuous manufacturing system. Production automation ensures the highest level of product quality, from receipt of raw materials, to final packaging of NanoXplore’s GrapheneBlack powders. The new facility uses lean production techniques to manage all operational processes and all process inputs are managed by Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). The lack of manual processes within the production line facilitates batch-to-batch product consistency complimented with the highest level of quality assurance.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new roll-to-roll production process for large sheets of high-quality graphene, which the team says could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronics.

The new manufacturing process, which the team says should be relatively easy to scale up for industrial production, involves an intermediate “buffer” layer of material that is key to the technique’s success. The buffer allows the ultrathin graphene sheet, less than a nanometer (billionth of a meter) thick, to be easily lifted off from its substrate, allowing for rapid roll-to-roll manufacturing.