Tech Drivers are essential for true and sustained Booms. SL Vein Graphite and MRL Corporation are riding the back of a Monumental Tech Revolution and Drivers.
Tech Drivers are accelerating how long they take from Birth to Market - Everything is accelerating and the S-Curve is turning into a Rocket Launch Pad...
Explaining the tech boom in emerging nations - BBC News
Graphene films can be used as transparent electrodes for touchscreens.
The city of Manchester, UK, is gearing up for a graphene jamboree. Graphene Week 2015, which kicks off on 22 June, is sure to delight its more than 600 attendees with a conference and celebrations of the ‘wonder material’. Graphene’s commercial future, however, is much less certain.
The atom-thin flakes of carbon are being produced in record volume and have found their way into a handful of eye-catching gizmos. But experts fret that graphene production far exceeds requirements, and that the material offers only marginal benefits over incumbent technologies in many of its target applications.
“There’s a heck of a lot of production capacity and not much demand, because we just haven’t seen any compelling technologies coming through,” says Ross Kozarsky, a senior analyst at market-intelligence company Lux Research, who is based in San Francisco, California.
This mirrors the trajectory of carbon nanotubes, which were once touted as transformative but have so far failed to make a significant commercial impact.
“Graphene looks much closer to the next carbon nanotube than the next silicon,” says Kozarsky. In a 2014 report, Lux predicted that the global market for graphene would be worth US$349 million by 2025; by comparison, the University of Manchester estimates that graphene has already attracted $2.4 billion for research (see ‘Market growth’).
Lux/Univ. Manchester
Some scientists are growing frustrated that companies are not lining up outside their offices begging to use the material, says Helena Theander, innovation deputy at the European Union’s €1-billion (US$1.1-billion) Graphene Flagship research programme, which was set up in 2013 to usher graphene from the lab to the marketplace within a decade.
Researchers have been in thrall to graphene’s properties ever since the material was first isolated by the University of Manchester’s Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (K. S. Novoselov et al. Science306, 666–669; 2004) — who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Graphene is transparent and flexible, yet very strong; electrons zoom through it; and it conducts heat ten times better than copper.
Enthusiasts expect these qualities to propel graphene into dozens of commercial applications, from flexible electronics to strong, lightweight composites.
Graphene glut
This has sparked a graphene-making frenzy, particularly in China (see ‘Manufacturing fever’), where the government has poured investment into some half a dozen ‘graphene industry parks’, which host research institutes and business incubators side by side.
Manufacturers enjoy reduced infrastructure costs, and are not expected to repay government grants. The graphene mass-produced in China falls broadly into two categories: thin films that can be used as transparent electrodes for touchscreens, for example, replacing the brittle indium tin oxide (ITO) used today; and nano-platelets, stacks of graphene flakes that form a black powder targeted at applications such as battery electrodes, in which their high surface area may help to store more charge.
Lux
Products are starting to appear. Last year, AWIT in Wuxi, China, brought 2,000 graphene-touchscreen phones to market, and in March, Galaxy Microsystems of Shenzhen, China, released 30,000 phones that use graphene in their touchscreens, cases and batteries (see ‘Batteries and phones rule’).
But Kozarsky says that some nanoplatelet producers are selling their product at below cost to offload their surplus. And although graphene-film factories have quoted impressive-sounding figures on capacity, these are sometimes used as a “marketing tool”, says Guocai Dong, vice-dean of the JiangNan Graphene Research Institute, which is in the Changzhou graphene park. “Most of the capacity is not used,” he says.
SIO Grafen
One reason for the mismatch is that graphene films still do not beat ITO on price. The films are grown on hot copper foil from a feedstock of methane gas mixed with hydrogen, in a process called chemical vapour deposition (CVD). Dong says that heating the foil, maintaining clean rooms and separating graphene from the foil tend to push the final cost above 400 yuan (US$64) per square metre, about twice what it needs to be to compete with ITO. And although graphene’s flexibility could add value to wearable devices, the wonder material will have to beat off other pretenders to ITO’s throne, including silver-nanowire meshes, which have been in development for longer.
A new approach to manufacturing is needed to depress costs further, says Xuesong Li, who helped to develop the copper-foil CVD method (X. Li et al. Science, 324,1312–1314; 2009).
Last year, Li founded LasLumin, a company in New York City that aims to slash graphene manufacturing costs by using feedstocks that are easier to handle than the potentially explosive mixture of methane and hydrogen. Graphene films may find more-profitable applications in innovative chemical sensors, rather than in taking on an established material such as ITO, he adds.
From lab to market
China also dominates the graphene patent landscape (see ‘Patent kings’). SIO Grafen, an innovation programme in Gothenburg, Sweden, that supports industrial graphene development, reported in March that Chinese entities hold 45% of all graphene patents granted in the seven categories that it surveyed. That is more than twice the share of China’s nearest rival, the United States.
However, most of the Chinese patents are registered nationally rather than globally, and they tend to be cited less often than the US ones, suggesting that they may not have much impact on graphene’s long-term commercial development.
SIO Grafen
Enter the Graphene Flagship, which plans to focus on quality and innovation. With that in mind, Theander has run seven Graphene Connect workshops to introduce small and medium-sized companies to graphene researchers, and will host another during Graphene Week. But she says it is too soon for concrete results:
“Growing trust and new relationships takes time, so I imagine it will take a couple of years until we have true success stories.”
A similar approach has proved successful at the University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute (NGI), says its business director, James Baker. The NGI has almost 40 industrial partners who have funded work at the university; the biggest, BGT Materials in Manchester, has a subsidiary called Graphene Lighting that unveiled a ‘graphene light bulb’ in March.
The bulb is actually a conventional light-emitting diode (LED) coated with a transparent film of graphene that draws off heat more effectively than conventional metal components, improving the efficiency and longevity of the LED. The company hopes that the bulb will go on sale in the next few months.
Meanwhile, Baker notes, multinational sports-equipment company Head has unveiled a range of tennis rackets that are strengthened by a dash of graphene in their frames.
Such niche applications are a start, but if graphene is to fulfil the commercial potential anticipated by projects such as the Graphene Flagship, it will need to find a role in which it dramatically and reliably outperforms existing technologies at a reasonable cost.
Baker believes that the answer lies in creating devices that rely on a combination of graphene’s properties — flexible electronics, for example — or that could have a transformative global impact, such as in membranes that desalinate water. But it is early days, he says:
“There are so many potential applications that it’s difficult to see what will be the killer app.”
Personally I think this article is slightly slanted in its punchline. There are so many potential applications but where is the killer product?????
I find this highly illogical. If I said to you; there is so many uses for the Transistor; but where is its killer product? You would think my elevator did not reach the top floor !!!
Britain’s big bet on graphene
Manchester institute will focus on commercial applications of atom-thick carbon sheets.
Still this has some important data points to consider in my opinion...
I think MRL Corporation is going to be able to take advantage of this in a highly disruptive and undercutting way by turning ORE into GRAPHENE in 1 STEP !
The battery charging station for electric vehicles at the Beijing Capital International Airport, Oct. 30, 2014. (Photo/Xinhua)
Graphene is to be used in the mass production of electric car batteries in China in 2015, the state broadcaster China National Radio reports.
The research and development of graphene expanded quickly after it was first produced in the lab in 2004 by two scientists from the University of Manchester. A big breakthrough was achieved on Dec. 4 when the so-called super battery for electric vehicles which charges in eight minutes due to the graphene polymer technology was released by Spanish company Graphenano and the University of Cordoba in Spain.
US electric car company Tesla Motors announced the launch of the Roadster 3.0 on Dec. 26, 2014.
The 3.0 version of the car uses graphene in the production of the battery, which increases its energy storage capacity significantly. The battery range improves by 50% which enables the 3.0 version to travel 644 km on one charge, a non-stop drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, according to Tesla.
China has established several graphene development bases in Chongqing, Wuxi, Nanjing and Qingdao. But graphene researchers said that the development in China is mainly to apply graphene to existing lithium-ion batteries rather than using the graphene to make the battery itself.
The country's 13th five-year plan (2016-2020) may include graphene development, said Li Yichun, president of the Chinese Graphene Technology Strategic Alliance.
Lots of useful Data points in this article we can deduce from in my opinion. Because of the properties of SL Vein Graphite; MRL Corporation can expect no end of Customers in my opinion. Their new Drill will certainly speed this up dramatically in my opinion...
Graphene offers a lot of potential when it comes to technological innovation. (Photo : commons.wikimedia.org)
Two of China’s technology firms have launched the world’s first-ever graphene phones, beating other huge international brands in the tough smartphone market.
On March 2, Moxi and Galapad technology companies jointly put on sale the first 30,000 units of graphene phones. The revolutionary tech gadget is available in China's Chongqing municipality.
According to the producers, incorporating graphene in a smartphone makes touchscreens more responsive to the user's movements. Moreover, this material is seen to prolong battery life by 50 percent, a huge advantage over other brands.
Developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the graphene phones can be bought for 2,499 yuan ($406). It utilizes the popular and user-friendly Android system.
Graphene, a single-layered, honeycomb-patterned carbon atoms, has been eyed by many scientists throughout the world to be used in mobile gadget technology. The material was first isolated back in 2004 by a research team led by Nobel Prize awardee Kostya Novoselov.
According to Novoselov, graphenes "will serve as one of the keystones in supporting science, technology and innovation." It can be further utilized in food packaging and medical technology.
"Graphene is potentially a game-changer--its properties make it one of the most important commercial scientific breakthroughs in recent memory," U.K. chancellor George Osborne enthused.
Currently, China is the world's leader in mass-producing graphene films for mobile phone and computer touchscreens.
In 2013, a Chongqing-based production line went into operation. The line is capable of producing tens of millions of such films annually, a significant amount that can be utilized for creating huge numbers of graphene smartphone units.
Last but not least the Graphene Phones represent a massive global market and MRL Corporation can set high Premiums for their ORE and Graphene while still undercutting the rest just because its Properties are that good.
Just look at the Investment Drivers and compare them to other Graphiters...
