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AChamarthy | 7 years ago

Many applications of Graphene are already on the market (ex. lighter and stiffer bicycle frames, bicycle tires, sports equipment, electronic inks and paints etc). However, these are based on lower quality Graphene powders or nanoplatelets (essentially a commodity at this point) which are used as an additive to a starting epoxy or resin material.

Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) is the method used to produce the highest quality graphene (usually on Copper). Several companies (Graphenea etc) have scaled up CVD and continue to work towards much lower $ / m^2 targets in the near future.

The main challenge in the industry is currently the transfer step. Current methods to transfer Graphene from growth substrate to target substrate are inefficient and not amenable to high volume manufacturing.

"Roll to Roll" (what the paper is referring to) aims to solve this - companies like Samsung, LG, and Sony have been exploring Roll to Roll systems for flexible electronics/display applications.

After flexible applications, the next step is to enable CMOS compatibility / transfer to Silicon wafers. I'm the co-founder of a company in Austin that is working towards this.

discuss

order

logicallee|7 years ago

Thanks for making this very informative comment! It was very interesting.

Can you give an insider's perspective on graphene's supercapacitor applications, if any? What does it mean in practice?

I realize given your disclaimer at the end if there are those kinds of applications you will want to promote them versus listing shortcomings, but if you would at least allude to the shortcomings too I would really appreciate the honesty: I saw a lot of articles about its supercap applications when graphene began to be synthesized but haven't heard much since (and it's not in your short list in your first sentence at all).

AChamarthy|7 years ago

In theory, you achieve high power and long charge-discharge lifetimes with graphene-based supercapacitors

The Graphene Flagship is focused on developing methods for combining few-layer graphene and silicon nanoparticles to obtain high performance silicon-graphene anodes.

These new methods need to be cost- effective, scalable and compatible with commercial battery electrode fabrication methods (current bottlenecks). Progress continues to be made in scaling up capacity and size. Flexible graphene supercapacitors were on display at the recent Mobile World Congress

You might've seen this from Samsung - https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-battery-mat...

mrfusion|7 years ago

How do these low quality graphene products you mentioned compare to carbon fiber?

And How does graphene compare to carbon fiber in general? Will we make airplanes and spacecraft out of it someday?

AChamarthy|7 years ago

Vs. Carbon Fiber, it depends on the application and intended use case

Re: aerospace, from a recent report, "Graphene can give multifunctional benefits to composites, including increased mechanical properties and conductivity. To protect against lightning strikes, the composite structures of aircraft contain metal meshes or have embedded conduc- tive wires. Graphene-containing composites could provide lightning-strike protection with the advantage of a simplified production process and weight reduction.

This year, a team comprising engineers and scientists from Airbus, Aernnova and Grupo Antolin have developed a prototype aircraft component using a graphene- based composite material. A section of the horizontal tail plane leading edge (HTPLE) of the Airbus A350 XWB was manufactured using industry standard resin transfer moulding of a graphene-based composite. The performance of this prototype compo- nent will be validated through electrical, mechanical and impact testing during the Core 2 phase."

agumonkey|7 years ago

How large is the "crowd" in the field (companies, research labs, conferences) ?

AChamarthy|7 years ago

EU's biggest research initiative is the Graphene Flagship - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene_Flagship

Major Conferences - Graphene Week, Mobile World Congress (Barcelona + SF), National Graphene Association (inaugural conference was Oct 2017)

Major universities in the US - UT Austin, UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Rice, Berkeley. Lot of activity in Korea, Japan, and China

Companies - Various companies on growth side. Lot of companies doing work in composites and coatings. Various startups looking into supercap, audio, sensor, battery, and water filtration applications