Growing the graphene industry

Graphene is a carbon-based nanomaterial with some genuinely fantastic properties. Its single-atom carbon lattice structure makes it two hundred times stronger than steel and an incredibly effective conductor of heat and electricity. It’s also fragile and lightweight – one gram of graphene could cover an entire soccer field!

Graphene is also an excellent team player and readily lends its properties to other materials and products it is incorporated into.

Professor Dusan Losic from the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials leads the University of Adelaide team at the ARC Graphene Research Hub and has been investigating how graphene can be used to give other materials a helping hand.

“Cement is one of our most essential construction materials, but the process of manufacturing it generates large amounts of CO2. My team has discovered that adding just a small amount of graphene to cement reduces the amount of CO2 released during its production and use and dramatically increases its strength and durability,” says Professor Losic.

“However, graphene has historically been tough to produce at industrial scale and has been far too expensive for most companies to justify investing in it,” Professor Losic adds.

This is one of the critical problems that the Graphene Research Hub has solved with their industry partner First Graphene.

The team has developed a novel electrochemical process that converts graphite rocks into graphene, producing high-quality powders at a significantly reduced cost. With low energy, no chemical waste and labour compared with other chemical-based methods.

First, Graphene has now scaled this process up at its manufacturing plant in Western Australia. It will soon become one of the world’s largest graphene manufacturers,  producing the best quality graphene at a competitive price that companies around the globe can use.

What’s next?

Armed with these improved manufacturing processes, researchers are developing new graphene-based products and technologies to address some of the most challenging problems in energy, environment, climate change, and agriculture.

Projects now underway include biosensors for disease diagnostics using highly conductive graphene inks, protective coatings, new energy storage devices, and graphene-based adsorbents that can remove toxic pollutants from soil and water.

Source: University of Adelaide