Materials
Graphene – is it the wonder materal? Louise Smyth assesses the potential
commercialisation of this new wonder material.
In the black F
or something that’s not even visible to the naked eye, graphene is causing a hell of a lot of excitement among
scientists and design engineers. When you consider its much- heralded properties (200 times stronger than steel, the world’s most conductive material, one million times thinner than a human hair), the appeal for designers is clear. The tricky part, however, is how we can exploit these properties in real-world applications – in other words, how to take graphene out of the science lab and into industry.
One man well placed to address this issue is James Baker, business director for graphene at The University of Manchester (the self- described ‘home of graphene’ due to it being isolated there in 2004). Baker is overseeing the completion of the National Graphene Institute at the university, a £61million facility for graphene research funded by the UK Government
and the European Regional Development Fund that’s due to come online in early 2015. His background in industry (working for the likes of BAE Systems) will stand him in good stead as he tries to take graphene to the next level. “My role focuses on finding the industrial partners that will work alongside the academics and researchers to take graphene from science and into application,” he explains.
He’s not short on those researchers either, with 200 of them at Manchester alone, working on physics, chemistry, materials science and biomedical applications for the ‘wonder material’. Neither is he lacking in potential uses for it. “Due to its qualities (for instance it is strong, flexible, transparent and more conductive than copper) we’re hearing about its use in applications ranging from electronics to structures through to membranes and coatings – there’s not an application you can think of where graphene might not have an effect.”
But as Baker observes, there are two main hurdles to be addressed before this vast potential can be realised. “The challenges are ‘how do you produce the graphene in the purity that’s needed for these applications?’ And ‘how do you make sure those great properties are retained when you mix the graphene with something else?’”
Baker reveals that the National Graphene Institute will be setting
Fig. 1. Space for caption for this image – Graphene Quantum Capicitance.
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