So why does Graphene Technologies CEO John Myers sound so downbeat about the atom-thick carbon lattice?

Speaking at Graphene Live in Berlin — co-located with the Printed Electronics Europe 2013 event — Myers pretty much asked the crowd of attendees whether any of them had any idea what to do with the stuff:

“I’m skeptical about the market I’m in now. There’s a lot of enthusiasm, but also a lot of confusion. The problem is there isn’t a market of any significant size for graphene.

“We all do ourselves a disservice with our inarticulate, self-congratulatory posturing. The fact is there isn’t a killer app yet and there’s no reason to think there will be, except there’s a lot of [effort] and money being thrown at it, and the material does appear to have a lot of potential.”

That potential is a big reason for the hype around graphene (which, we should bear in mind, was only manufactured for the first time less than a decade ago). Because of graphene’s properties, many see it as a possible successor to silicon — a material whose own computing-friendly properties will break down if we miniaturize it much more than we already do.

The problem there is that graphene doesn’t have an intrinsic band gap, making it tricky to use in transistors — simply put, you can’t turn a pure graphene transistor off. This may yet be fixed through clever doping (coating) techniques, but we still don’t know for sure whether that can be done while retaining graphene’s advantages.

What about touchscreens? Graphene is transparent and highly conductive, so in that regard it could be a great rival to the frequently-used indium-tin-oxide (ITO) as a conductive coating – and it’s more flexible, too. However, as IDTechEx analyst Khasha Ghaffarzadeh pointed out, graphene doesn’t significantly outperform ITO. It also has serious rivals on the flexibility front, chiefly from carbon nanotubes. Then there’s the fact that while there are concerns over the future supply of indium, an ever-increasing amount of the rare metal is being retrieved through recycling.

Graphene is also touted as a replacement for activated carbon in the electrodes of supercapacitors, which are used in electric car batteries, for example. But, Ghaffarzadeh said, “it is again trying to replace a material that is well-known and low-cost.” And as a replacement for graphite (the source of graphene, of course) in carbon fiber? Ditto. How about for use in conductive inks? Again, carbon pastes are the rival, and they’re pretty cheap too.

As Ghaffarzadeh said:

“The potential is enormous, but it’s trying to do things that already exist, only a little bit better and a bit cheaper. We need new concepts that graphene alone is enabling: new platforms.”

Myers noted that we are “more than likely going to end up with a range of carbon nano-products, each of which will have a range of interesting features and uses.” Regarding graphene, he added that he hates competing on price, and doesn’t want to “go into a market where the value proposition is that I’m cheaper than the other guy.”

“I would urge everyone in the field to think about the process opportunity,” Myers said. “There’s no practical limit to the amount of this material that can be made. That means that, in the bulk world, graphene is going to be a commodity. As a business, you have to think about what kind of value you can create with the material, because you’re not going to make any money producing it.”

To that end, he added, Graphene Technologies has joined the brand new Graphene Stakeholders Association, which opened its doors on Thursday. There, he suggested, various players in the nascent scene can educate each other and collaborate.

And, hopefully, find the killer app for this wondrous substance.

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But a startup out of Jessup, Maryland, called Vorbeck Materials, is one of the leaders in both producing graphene and also dreaming up products from batteries to wearables that can be made using the so-called miracle material. Vorbeck was founded in 2006 to commercialize a proprietary graphene material developed by Princeton chemical engineers Ilhan Aksay and Robert Prud’homme, and the company has a ton-scale factory churning out graphene in Jessup.

There’s a bit of a graphene gold rush happening right now, with a flurry of patents being filed, and Lux Research estimates that graphene will grow from a paltry $9 million market in 2012 to a $126 million market in 2020 — that’s a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent. At the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Summit this week, I got a chance to check out four novel products that Vorbeck worked on in conjunction with partners.

Graphene ink

In 2009 Vorbeck commercialized its graphene ink, called Vor-ink, which the company says was the world’s first commercial graphene-based product. In the photo above the paper has been printed with the ink and can conduct an electrical charge. Vorbeck’s Director of Development Christy Martin told me that the paper is really durable and demonstrated that property by crumpling it up into a little ball.

Graphene-based battery

Graphene can also be used as an additive in batteries to give them more energy density (amount of energy they can store), boost the charge rate, and increase the cycle life. In conjunction with Princeton and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Vorbeck has been working on graphene-based battery technology. The ARPA-E awarded Vorbeck a $1.5 million grant to develop a lithium sulfur battery for hybrid vehicles.

Graphene in wearables

This messenger bag uses Vorbeck’s graphene ink to enable an embedded electronic in the strap. Mobile devices can be charged and an embedded indicator light can show when gadgets are charging and to turn on and off an safety bike light. Vorbeck launched and showed off the bag at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Graphene security packaging

Vorbeck worked with packaging company MWV to create a graphene-based package for products that need an embedded security system. Picture the security systems that places like Walgreens uses now for products: razors behind glass or clamped down with plastic sensors. But with the graphene package a sensor can detect when the package has been moved, taken out of the building or even cut open. Graphene is cheap enough that it adds just a couple of pennies to the packaging cost, said Martin. Home Depot and CVS stores in some areas of the east coast are already using this packaging.

A close up of the embedded graphene under the surface of the outer layer of the Vorbeck packaging.

Vorbeck has raised at least $4.7 million in funding, and has less than 50 employees. Lux Research says that Vorbeck, along with XG Sciences, are the leading graphene startups, but also says there’s a wave of new graphene startups emerging including Graphene Technologies, Grafoid, National Nanomaterials, Xolve, and Haydale.

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It’s not hyperbole to say graphene is an amazing substance. Successfully made for the first time less than a decade ago by University of Manchester researchers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who have since received both a Nobel prize and knighthoods, graphene is an atom-thick layer of carbon with properties we are only starting to understand.

Here’s a brief rundown of some of things graphene represents:

• The best electrical conductor, at room temperature
• The best thermal conductor, even more so than carbon nanotubes
• The strongest material, despite being the thinnest
• The stiffest material, despite being the most ductile

The main reason people are so keen on the stuff is that the benefits of making smaller and smaller silicon-based electronics will soon break down at the nano-scale. Quite simply, we need a replacement material, and graphene ticks a lot of boxes. There are also huge implications for wearable and printable electronics. According to Lux Research, the graphene market was worth $9 million in 2012 but will be worth $126 million in 2020 — depending on how quickly we see graphene-based products come to market, that may be a conservative estimate.

So how did the researchers make it back in 2004? By applying adhesive tape to graphite and peeling it back really carefully (seriously: the tape dispenser is now in the Nobel museum). But, while that provides an amusing genesis for a substance that may very well take over from silicon, it’s not a great way to make graphene in bulk. And while IBM is working on making graphene-based semiconductors and others are developing batteries using the stuff, the UK is finding itself left behind in the race to actually productize graphene (PDF).

Which is why, last month, the UK government ponied up £21.5 million ($34 million) to stimulate graphene research there. Now we’re seeing how that’s going to be used, as the University of Cambridge today announced that a new Cambridge Graphene Centre will open its doors on 1 February. This is in addition to the University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute, which also shares in the government cash and will open in 2015, and further work being carried out at Lancaster University.

“We are targeting applications and manufacturing processes, and broadening research to other two-dimensional materials and hybrid systems. The integration of these new materials could bring a new dimension to future technologies, creating faster, thinner, stronger, more flexible broadband devices,” Professor Andrew Ferrari, director of the new Cambridge center, said in a statement.

Industry is also involved in the Cambridge Graphene Centre – companies such as Nokia, Dyson, Philips, Plastic Logic and BaE Systems have put in an extra £13 million.

This is all about making graphene a commercially-available reality, so the center’s work will focus on coming up with reliable manufacturing processes. This isn’t easy with a two-dimensional substance, and the team hopes chemical vapor deposition (CVD) will work for graphene as it has for other materials such as diamond and carbon nanotubes. As CVD is also regularly used for depositing silicon carbide in today’s chip industry, there would be a continuity advantage to consider there.

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The chip world is close to hitting a wall because cramming billions of transistors on something that’s smaller than your fingernail is really hard. But it can and is done by the chip industry every single day. What’s harder though is breaking the laws of physics in order to keep piling those transistors onto ever smaller chips, but if we want our devices to get smarter, faster and cheaper that may be what we have to do.

For example, Intel is currently making its fastest chips with line widths of 22 nanometers but has plans to get down to five nanometers (the smaller those line widths, the more transistors you can put on the chip). To get to the 22 nanometer point required Intel researchers to re-invent the transistor, which took Intel scientists a decade. Like, I said. This is hard.

IBM also makes chips and has its own R&D efforts aimed at keeping the cheaper and faster curve enabled by Moore’s Law going. But before it (or Intel) can go breaking the laws of physics, scientists have to have the tools to know what the heck they are doing, which is why IBM’s announcement today is such a big deal.

Individual molecular bonds seen by IBM’s new microscopy technique.

IBM’s atomic force microscopy technique will allow researchers see the chemical bonds between carbon atoms and eventually the bonds between atoms in manufactured sheets of carbon called graphene. For chipmakers, graphene is emerging as a possible replacement for silicon in some areas, although it’s far too early to tell. Plenty of universities and white coated folks in corporate labs are playing around with getting graphene hoping for a breakthrough that could lead to better wireless radios, more efficient solar panels, better batteries, new displays and even faster CPUs.

From IBM’s release:

The individual bonds between carbon atoms in such molecules differ subtly in their length and strength. All the important chemical, electronic, and optical properties of such molecules are related to the differences of bonds in the polyaromatic systems. Now, for the first time, these differences were detected for both individual molecules and bonds. This can increase basic understanding at the level of individual molecules, important for research on novel electronic devices, organic solar cells, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). In particular, the relaxation of bonds around defects in graphene as well as the changing of bonds in chemical reactions and in excited states could potentially be studied.

So while you may never need to use an atomic force microscope (it has a tip that is terminated with a single carbon monoxide molecule!) rest assured that a crew of researchers are diligently playing with it in the hopes that your 2025 mobile phone has a sweet display and a longer-lasting battery.

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Here’s three blue-sky energy innovations I’ve been following this week:

Spray on graphene: A team at the University of Exeter have developed a new material adapted from graphene — called GraphExeter — that they say is the most transparent, flexible, and light weight material that can conduct electricity. The material, which squishes molecules of ferric chloride between two layers of graphene, could be used to create new kinds of wearable electronics as well as dynamic windows that can shade when charged with electricity.

Graphene is one of the thinnest materials that can conduct electricity so a lot of scientists are looking at ways to use it in energy storage devices. The Exeter team, which is out of their Centre for Graphene Science group, is now in the process of developing a spray-on version of GraphExter. The scientists published their findings in the publication Advanced Materials recently.

Shining quantum dots: The Guardian takes a look at quantum dots, which are these little pieces of semiconductor crystals — less than 10 nanometres — that are so small that they have different properties and characteristics than larger semiconductor pieces. The Guardian says these are so important that one day they’ll be in everything from solar cells to light bulbs to imaging technology. A partnership between QD Vision, an MIT spinout, and Nexxus Lighting, are some of the first to commercialize this technology in lighting, specifically LEDs.

Bedazzled by bejeweled nanowires: Stanford engineers are coating nanowires with tiny particles to increase their performance, which could lead to better solar cells and lithium ion batteries. The team’s innovation came in the method to make the bejeweled nanowires. From the Stanford article:

Assistant Professor Xiaolin Zheng “dipped the nanowires in a solvent-based gel of metal and salt, then air-dried them before applying the flame. In her process the solvent burns away in a few seconds, allowing the all-important nanoparticles to crystalize into branch-like structures fanning out from the nanowires.”

Image courtesy of Centre for Graphene Science.

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Racetrack memory: IBM’s racetrack memory offers the ability to store massive quantities of information like hard drives do but has no moving parts like solid state drives do, so it’s faster. It’s called a racetrack because it pushes electrons around a wire kind of like a car goes around a racetrack. After years of research, IBM said Monday it can make such devices.

This still isn’t mass production, and the big challenge here is making it power-efficient (driving those electronics through the racetrack requires a big current), but it could provide a means to a new type of faster computing. As IBM said in its release, “This breakthrough could lead to a new type of data-centric computing that allows massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second.”

Here is a video I did back in 2010 at IBM’s Spintronics lab that explains racetrack memory and how it relates to storing more data that can be read faster.

Graphene: IBM also made two materials breakthroughs, beginning with a way to build chips using a carbon-based material called graphene. Graphene could offer better wireless chips because it could allow chips to deliver data over higher frequency bands, and also could lead to long-lasting batteries and breakthroughs in clean energy. Taking advantage of higher frequencies means we could use more of the airwaves and help assuage our growing demand for wireless broadband.

The challenge with graphene is figuring out how to use it in today’s chipmaking fabrication plants, to avoid the multi-billion-dollar costs associated with building such a plant solely to produce graphene chips. IBM said today that it had solved this problem– building a graphene-based chip that is compatible with conventional (CMOS) chipmaking technologies.

Carbon nanotubes: The carbon nanotube announcement is a bit more out there, with researchers demonstrating the first transistor with channel lengths that are smaller than 10 nanometers built using carbon nanotubes. The channel length refers to how deep the lines on a chip are etched, and the goal is to make those smaller and smaller in order to fit more chips on a wafer and continue pushing Moore’s Law forward.

But as transistor channel lengths shrink, conventional chipmaking technologies are running into a variety of problems, which is why Intel made such a big deal of its 3-D transistors earlier this year. However, it’s not clear if that advance will continue below 11 nanometers. Of course, as researchers seek ever smaller chips, some are abandoning the idea of the transistor completely with technologies such as DNA computing, Quantum computing and even brain-like computers. For the time being, IBM’s carbon nanotubes are still in that commercialization phase along with these other efforts, so don’t break out the bubbly just yet.

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It turns out cell phones and electric cars have more in common than you might think, and technology developed for phones could help pave the way for more powerful electric cars. A prime example of this is that one of the world’s largest carbon and graphite producers, GrafTech International, has begun eying the world of electric vehicles as a new opportunity for materials designed to handle heat in the shrinking confines of gadgets.

From iPhone to EV

GrafTech International, a massive graphite electrode supplier, has been manufacturing flexible graphite materials since the 1960s. In electronics, GrafTech first saw its graphite heat spreaders used in flat panel TVs, and later in laptops and smart phones, including Apple’s iPhone. As Julian Norley, a senior corporate fellow at GrafTech, explained in an interview, “It can take heat from any component and basically spread it out.”

Today, GrafTech is in the process of turning its heat-spreading materials into a component for battery packs that could appear in retrofits of current electric vehicles as early as 2014, and in production EVs sometime after that, according to the company, which also makes carbon and graphite-based materials for applications ranging from solid state lighting and semiconductors to fuel cells and nuclear reactors.

In the electric car space, battery pack manufacturers and systems integrators are GrafTech’s target customers, although as Ian McCallum, manager of GrafTech’s market development group, noted, some automakers (notably General Motors and Tesla Motors) are taking it upon themselves to own their own battery pack technology.

Graphite’s Appeal

Aluminum and copper were the traditional heat spreaders for electronics, said Norley. But graphite, boasting lighter weight and higher thermal conductivity than either metal, has displaced aluminum and copper on “the higher-performance end.”

Yet EV makers and their battery suppliers, “without any other obvious options,” said McCallum, are commonly using “relatively thick aluminum dividers between cells and calling that their thermal solution.” Often, he added, there is also a liquid or air cooling system integrated on top of that.

What graphite-based alternatives can do, at least in theory, is handle the same amount of heat with much less bulk than aluminum (or handle significantly more heat for the same bulk). Based on internal models, Norley said the combined weight of heat spreaders in a typical automotive battery pack could be reduced by about 75 percent when using graphite materials instead of aluminum.

Of course, heat spreaders are but a sliver of the cell. Swapping out aluminum for graphite heat spreaders in a 9-millimeter-thick cell, for example, might make room for 214 cells in a pack where previously only 200 cells would fit. “Not very impressive,” as McCallum put it. “But battery manufacturers would kill for a 7 percent increase in energy density” (packing those 14 extra cells into the space of a 200-cell pack).

Simply swapping out the aluminum for the graphite has its benefits: making it possible to build a battery with the “same cells, but less stuff in the pack,” as GrafTech research scientist Ryan Wayne put it. But what gets Norley and Wayne really excited is the possibility of designing batteries in new ways with these new materials. “Maybe you fit two packs where you could only fit one,” suggested Wayne, or use “a thicker graphite that can handle more heat” for a more powerful pack.

Cost is key

Alex Carter, an analyst with the market research firm Lux Research, agreed that thermal management materials offer a “big opportunity going forward,” since they sit at the intersection of two growth industries: electronics and energy storage.

Yet in a time when batteries still make up as much as 40-50 percent of the total cost of an electric car, said Carter, low-cost aluminum has a distinct advantage. EV makers are “in a phase right now where cost is paramount,” he said.

As the cost of other battery components comes down, Carter predicted, it will create “breathing room” for car companies and battery suppliers to consider investing in higher performance, higher cost materials like graphite heat spreaders.

Sizing up the competition

In addition to GrafTech and other suppliers of engineered graphite, companies like Leyden Energy are already using graphite foil in lithium-ion batteries. And advanced graphite materials are part of a larger trend of “carbon materials coming into their own,” said Carter. Down the road, he added, flexible graphite materials could face stiff competition from graphene (a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon), which Intel is developing for use in heat spreaders for computer chips.

Plus, aluminum producers shouldn’t be expected to stand still. “Alcoa wouldn’t want to lose a major growth market,” said Carter. So as aluminum comes under pressure from new materials, expect higher-performance aluminum alloys to come on the market. That’s what happened in the aerospace segment, said Carter, when carbon fiber began to compete with aluminum.

So far, GrafTech has tested its materials in battery packs for an electric bicycle and an electric motorcycle (the latter in partnership with Ohio State University). The University of Einhoven, another GrafTech partner, is building a 16 kWh lithium-ion pack for racing using all-graphite heat spreading materials. Beyond academia, GrafTech said multiple battery makers are testing its heat spreaders for use in electric vehicle applications.

According to Norley, incumbent technology is the biggest competitor for graphite heat spreaders in electric vehicle applications. Working with graphite would require the understanding of a new material and a new way of doing things in a field where already “everything’s uncomfortably fast,” said McCallum. But then, that’s the same challenge GrafTech faced in consumer electronics, and now we have graphite heat spreaders sandwiched into our phones.

Images courtesy of yellowcloud, GrafTech, Appfire, International Battery, and Leyden Energy.

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Feds Fund Graphene Additive Research: The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research has awarded a team of scientists a two-year, $3-million grant to develop nanoscale graphene additives for fuels to help supersonic jets fly faster and make diesel engines cleaner and more efficient. — Green Car Congress

Army Green: An environmental, health and safety management system called Enviance is being rolled out to 11 more Army facilities around the country to help track their carbon “bootprint” as part of a larger initiative for the Army to expand its traditional energy security focus. — NYT’s Green Inc.

Chat With GM’s Jon Lauckner: General Motors has scheduled an online chat for tomorrow with Global Program Management VP Jon Lauckner, who has been part of the Chevy Volt leadership team since the model’s early days. — AutoblogGreen

Fuel Clinic for MPG Geek: A new, free online tool Fuel Clinic lets you create a profile, track up to five vehicles and get visual feedback on your driving habits. — Wired’s Autopia

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