The Current State of Graphene

We've all been following the evolution of graphene for years now or ever since it came into light with the 2010 Nobel Prize. However, graphene has been around for longer than that or at least 63 years in the making. Nine years after graphene took over the world by storm, many of us are still wondering about where are all the things that we were promised made with graphene?

It all started with a block of graphite back in 2004 when two scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester managed to produce something that was in the works for the past 14 years. Since 1990, scientists were trying to come up with different methods to isolate graphene from graphite. Sadly, for all that time, all they managed to get was nothing thinner than 50 to 100 layers. However, this is only part of the story as the single-layered sheet was first theorized back in 1947 by Pierre Wallace as an attempt to understand the electronic properties of 3D graphite.

63 years later and it became a hit! Suddenly, everyone was talking about the ‘Wonder material’ that would make computer chips thousands of times faster of an atom-thick sheet that could hold a baby, impenetrable armor, batteries that could hold hundreds of times the current energy density and you name it. Suddenly, everything just sorts of stopped. Since 2010 graphene has been on the news but not as much as used to partially because the hype slowed down after peak in 2014.

Not that it went away, even though the news was promising, something is still missing. There are many reasons why this happened but the main one comes down to one simple fact. This one magical product that we've been waiting for is just not here yet that is because of one big problem. Scaling of graphene production has been the challenge for the past nine years or so. There were many proposed ways to produce it but unfortunately, they all fail at the same point.

You see the one major problem. that researchers are facing is on how to make a large enough sheet that is free of defects especially if you want to make electronic components. In this case, you have to make sure that the sheet is free of defects, or else it won't behave the magical way that we expect. Because of this, the race to find ways for mass production is a closely held secret even for universities like MIT. Ultimately, we are talking about easily a billion, if not a trillion-dollar industry based in a single material. So, we should expect the race to find bigger and better solutions for mass production to be a fierce one.

Now, scaling up the production is by far the biggest problem holding back the adoption of graphene since quantity is very limited and quality is questionable. Another big issue that researchers face with mass production is the misaligned crystal structure of the graphene sheets. This pattern that you see here fundamentally changes the properties of graphene yielding a less efficient product.

For you to get all of the magical properties of graphene, you have to have one continuous and uninterrupted sheet. Currently, this is the challenge for electronic components and structural strengthening. For structural strengthening, these misalignments make it easier for the sheet to break or rip with enough stress. As for electronics, it makes it harder for you to create bandgaps so it can be switched off.

We should remember that the silicon industry went through the same problem when they first started using it to make computer components. Just like they had refinement and purity issues, graphene is going through the same path. The only difference is that we now have a lot more developed technologies that can help speed up the research. Nevertheless, everyone is still waiting for that one product that will revolutionize everything. For instance, everything will change in a matter of seconds if Intel or AMD created a graphene chip that is a thousand times faster than the current generation. but we are still at least five years away from this technology so I guess we'll have to wait.

Also, you have to keep in mind of how disruptive this would be if any of these companies created this magic chip. Many of the gadgets that we use today would see a sharp declining price because graphene eventually will become much cheaper. That is not good for business unless you are the startup to develop the technology to which most likely it would be bought by the big company anyway. Regardless, the introduction of anything as disruptive has to be slow, exactly what we are seeing right now. In spite of that, some companies are innovating and although their products aren't magical graphene is starting to take over some industries slowly as we'll see next.

There are three main immediate applications:

• thermal insulator
• nano-coating
• structural strengthening

These three properties have been tried with other materials for many years but it is the first time that a single one can do all three of them at such a high level and versatility. Nowadays, it is believed that the private space race will most likely be the booster for the development of graphene technologies. Fortunately for us, the sports industry is already using its equipment and some of the products are already available for you to buy. On a side note as a curiosity and you probably didn't know this, but graphene was actually used in the Winter Olympics of 2018 in the skeleton modality.

For those of you that don't know, it is the one sport where the guy runs in with a small sled and then dives on it rushing through the frozen track at high speeds. In this case, they used what they called Nanene which is not really a single sheet of but more likely a powdery graphene nano-platelete. This would fall more into the carbon fiber polymer, to be honest. The difference here is that Nanene is only 10 layers thick but even then you can still enjoy this strengthening property of graphene. If you're curious, it was used by the British medalists Dominik Parsons which won the bronze medal.

The concept here and as we'll see more later is that graphene can be used to strengthen any structure, making a lighter and stronger. For further reading, you can head to the Nanene web site where they have all of the information you need.

The tennis racquet company has a range of graphene composite rackets available since 2013, this company is actually one of the first to adopt graphene in its products and the one that stands out is the Graphene Speed series tennis racket and their skis for women. The system here is similar to the Nanene or in this case, it is speculated that they used what they call the AGM graphene flakes.

Applied graphene materials aka AGM is a company that is specialized in graphene solutions for commercial applications. On their website, they have a wide range of products like graphene and applied leads, paint and coating, polymer and composites, thermal paste, and so on. All of this is done with graphene nano-platelete which again is not a single sheet but it gets the job done.

Moving on, we have one of the best examples of what can we expect for the future of spaceships although this next example is not even close to one the user graphene highlights its potential as a structure strengthening material.

Dassi bike is a company based in the UK which claims to have created the first graphene bike frame although it only contains 1% of it. Make no mistake although it looks like an insignificant amount, this is enough to help this structure in many ways, and in this case, they achieve the frame weight of about 750 grams without paint. This is actually not too far from other brands however engineers believe that graphene will make it possible to produce frames that can weigh less than 400 grams. To achieve this, they applied graphene and applied leech suspended in an epoxy in between the layers of carbon fiber. This method increased the strength of about 70% or it's almost double the strength of the frame and the cost of the frame is about 8500 USD dollars. Let us not forget the tires….

Victoria is a bicycle tire manufacturing company that is based in Italy and recently developed a graphene layer filler for its tires which not only increases puncture resistance but also wet grip and durability.

The sports industry is not the only one benefiting here. Due to its thermal insulation and dissipation properties, some companies are already using it in their electronic components. Due to its excellent thermal conductivity property, graphene is by far the best candidate to be used as heat dissipation in passive or active cooling. A company specialized in computer components called Team Group made available recently one of the first computer solid-state drives (SSD) for their gaming line products called T fours mainly, an SSD with a graphene copper foil cooling that increased heat dissipation by 8 percent, increasing performance overall.

Other electronics can also benefit from graphene which is the case of earphones. Due to how thin you can make graphene, it can be used in their drive membrane or a diaphragm. A diaphragm is the thin semi-rigid membrane attached to the voice coil which moves in a magnetic gap vibrating the diaphragm and producing sound. The diaphragm is usually made out of silicone or polyurethane graphene is used here as a layered material to enhance its performance by making more lightweight which in turn improves sound sharpness and reduces high-frequency bands giving a better sound experience overall.

There are mainly two products being sold at the moment where one is from a Chinese based company called FIIO electronics that currently ships to the US and Canada. Anker, another Chinese based company has also made available its graphene-enhanced fully wireless earphones on its solo audio brand again. The promise here is to enhance sound quality.

Emberion photodetector is a big game-changer, this is the first of its kind as this detector is ultra-sensitive with an ultra-wide visible light detection, ranging from 400 to 1800 nanometers which could not be achieved with silicon sensors alone. They would often be, in part made with the IngaAs which is an alloy made out of indium gallium arsenide which is used to its wide bandgap properties too which creates a longer wavelength cutoff. Due to its rare element and complexity of fabrication, any IngaAs sensor is usually expensive while the Emberion graphene filter detector that might not require expensive elements is said to reduce the final cost of the photodetector by about 30 percent.

Vollebak is a company that started back in 2015 by the brothers, Nick and Steve Tidball with the goal of using science to make the future of clothing happen faster as it's stated on their website. In 2018, they introduced a jacket made with graphene and they claim that it's capable of many things like conducting electricity and heat. It's waterproof and breathable strong but not bulletproof yet. In theory, you would need more than thin layers of graphene to stop a low caliber bullet. If you like to get yourself one, you will need about $700 but make no mistake, this is only the first of its kind and it won't take long for us to have a bulletproof jacket since we are only a few layers away from achieving it.

In summary, there are a lot of promising things in the world of graphene and the message is clear the next five years will be an exciting time for this technology. We will see the rise of what was once thought impossible. All of the production problems that we know about are coming to an end. A single material will revolutionize all the industries in the world and just like plastic, it will become part of our daily lives.