Materials
out to answer these questions in various ways while also attempting to address the whole issue of ‘quality standards’. He details: “One thing the Institute is hoping to do is to try to put some framework around quality certification – i.e. ‘this is a form of graphene and here are the critical qualities you need to retain if you’re going to use it in this particular application’. It would be very difficult to commercialise any product if, every time you bought some raw material, it had a different form, property or specification.” He adds: “My background is in aerospace, where you must have that aspect tied down before you can consider putting it into a flying application. If the properties varied by more than a small natural amount you’d have to qualify/certify for every material you want to fly – which would cost a fortune.”
Yet in the consumer sector there are already companies selling graphene- based products without any form of standardisation being in place. Baker cites a well known tennis racquet firm that is currently offering a ‘graphene’ tennis racquet. He comments: “It’s probably 99.9% graphite. But on the positive side, it does have a small amount of graphene and that does appear to have transformed or altered the properties of the structure – in that it’s more lightweight.”
Other consumer applications will be among the first commercial examples of graphene-based products, with mobile phone screen covers coming first. Baker also says: “And if you can get the phone itself flexible, you could have bent screens, curved screens or you could even have a phone that you could fold in half if the rest of the components were also bendable.”
Away from the consumer sector Baker sees lots of interest in getting graphene into various energy-related applications – such as supercapacitors and batteries. He comments: “The area that really gets me
excited is that you could have structures that have battery or capacitor properties – you could store energy in an aircraft wing, for example. That would give you more endurance, so UAVs could stay in the air for longer, for instance. That’s a huge area, though there’s interest across the spectrum; from the battery in your iPad or phone to aerospace/automotive and broader energy applications.”
Fig. 2. Controlling magnetic clouds in graphene.
Baker adds: “The area I haven’t touched on yet is around membranes and barriers. Again there’s a huge interest and the university is leading the research around desalination. The ultimate theory is the graphene drinking straw: you put it into water and only pure water would come through. Questions being asked here include ‘can we add a filter to an existing plant or process?’ If you take a cup of seawater, put a little bit of pressure on it through a graphene filter, then potentially you could get drinking water through the other side.”
As well as the technical challenges addressed above, Baker also explains how there’s one more element standing in
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