Graphene and Carbon NanoTubes: Part 1
What it is, and why it’s important
Graphene is a material that has one sole element: carbon. Carbon forms very strong bonds with itself to make chains (hydrocarbons), crystals (diamond), and spherical shapes known as fullerenes. In graphene these atoms of carbon are bonded to each other to form a flat sheet that is only one atom thick, with the carbon forming a hexagonal grid. Take a sheet of graphene and roll it back on itself into a cylinder, and you have a carbon nanotube. A sheet graphene arranged as the skin on a sphere is called a bucky-ball, named after the buckminsterfullerene, the first discovered fullerene.
Typically, graphene is arranged in a “honeycomb” pattern and is black in color. Below is an image of graphene to give you a visual idea of what this is about:
Graphene, even as a single layer of carbon atoms is very strong and extremely light weight. Carbon nanotubes (CNT) are even stronger, as the stresses are distributed around the walls of the tube, like a rolled piece of paper is stronger than the same paper as a flat sheet. In fact carbon nanotubes may have the highest tensile strength of any fibrous material known to man (if we are someday able to produce them at lengths greater than a couple of millimeters).
Both graphene and CNTs have incredible electrical and thermal conduction capabilities, even becoming superconducting in some conditions. Both are typically black colored, stretchable, and can be twisted and returned back to original shape an unlimited number of times. These qualities have led to the development of wearable electronics and flexible circuitry using graphene as a breakthrough material.
Graphene has a plethora of promising uses: anti-corrosion coatings and paints, efficient and accurate sensors, quicker and lighter electronics, flexible screens, economical solar panels, more rapid DNA sequencing, pharmaceutical delivery, and more. Graphene is such a simple building block that many industries can theoretically incorporate graphene into their products to make them better, stronger, lighter. Graphene is beginning to be successfully integrated into cellphones (such as the Huawei Mate 20 X) to make foldable screens, higher capacity batteries, and displays that cool more efficiently. In this article we walk through current state of the art uses, progressive research concepts, five-year projections of the technology, startups working with graphene, and major players in the industry.
Why we aren’t using it in everything
In short, because carbon in these forms is difficult to produce and to incorporate in real-world applications. A single layer of graphene is so thin that it cannot be seen by the human eye. In fact if you layered one million sheets of graphene on top of each other it would be the thickness of a human hair. With material this thin, it requires extremely careful handling. And so today it is still only used in high-value and specialized applications.
The first graphene was isolated in 2004 by peeling a piece of adhesive tape off of a block of graphite, yielding a single layer of carbon one atom thick across the surface of the tape. This is because graphite is essentially a three dimensional stack of graphene layers bonded together. Like a stack of paper that has been soaked in water or glue; where the pages are layers of graphene held together with crosslinked carbon-carbon bonds between the sheets.
Today graphene is made in special reactors purpose-built for that task. The vast majority of graphene is produced today by exfoliating common graphite in a liquid bath, either by mechanical exfoliation (literally using a diamond knife to peel off layers), or electrochemical exfoliation in which chemical reactions and electrostatic repulsion are induced between the layers to separate them. However, both of these processes are quite rough on the material, and yield only tiny flakes of low-quality multi-layer graphene (due to failure to peel a single layer at a time), or with extensive mechanical damage to the crystalline structure. These flakes are referred to as nano-platelets.
It can also be fabricated using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in a large single sheet with a high surface area, this is a very difficult and expensive operation with the graphene layer being grown on a sheet of copper. It can also be produced by growing carbon nanotubes and then chemically de-bonded and flattening them to form microscopic strips of monolayer graphene.
As a result, graphene comes in various levels of quality ranging from from high quality monolayer graphene, down to tiny flecks of mechanically shredded powders. Perfect monolayer graphene is the highest quality and is what we see depicted in illustrations and diagrams. It has a perfect hexagonal pattern with high purity of sp2 bonds, extremely low surface inconsistency, and arrives in a pristine single layer. Then there is lower quality “few-layer” graphene that has multiple layers of graphene clumped together like the pages of a wet book, often with a great many defects, snags, and tattered edges). Most of the world’s producers of graphene are producing this latter low quality type, which is sometimes even called counterfeit graphene, since it is really flakes of graphite, with inferior physical properties that make it unusable for most real applications. Imagine trying to make use of a fishing net with many breaks and tears, and other sections that have many layers stitched together in clumps, all with loose, tattered outer edges.
A paper published in Advanced Materials (“The Worldwide Graphene Flake Production”) studied graphene purchased from 60 producers around the world. This study concluded: “that the quality of the graphene produced in the world today is rather poor, not optimal for most applications, and most companies are producing graphite microplatelets. This is possibly the main reason for the slow development of graphene applications, which usually require a customized solution in terms of graphene properties.” And further: “our extensive studies of graphene production worldwide indicate that there is almost no high quality graphene, as defined by the ISO (International Standards Organization), in the market yet.”
One way that sample quality is evaluated is by measuring the proportion of sp2 bonds in the material. The study found that “crystalline graphene should have 100% sp2 bonds. However, we were not able to find, in any of the companies studied, a sample with more than 60% sp2 bonds.” And an additional stumbling block is that most of what is sold as graphene is actually graphene oxide, with many oxygen atoms contaminating the mesh and weakening the Carbon-Carbon bonds.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have faced similar challenges in the push to incorporate them into real-world products. The typical CNT is only a few microns (thousandths of a millimeter) in length, and thus has limited applications that can make use of a structure of this size. And while scientists have succeeded in making CNTs that are 50 centimeters long, these long CNTs were produced at great expense in laboratory conditions. Despite their amazing properties we simply do not have the production technology yet to reliably produce these materials at economic scales.
At Prime Movers Lab we see the greatest investment opportunities in the near-term to be technologies that enable cheaper and higher quality production of these materials. A key consideration will be the companies and processes that can scale to meet the massive demand that is expected to emerge once consistent supply is realized; at which point it will be possible to develop specialized equipment to handle more standardized and predictable input materials.
Current State of the Art
Pharmaceuticals, material science, nanotechnology, and cellphone technology are all current environments where graphene is presently used or being considered. Being highly biocompatible, graphene oxide is being used to deliver cancer drugs, antibiotics, poorly soluble drugs, peptides, antibodies, DNA, RNA and nucleic acids in biotech applications. On the electronics side graphene is used to make super strong, lightweight materials, especially for flexible circuits and wearable technologies. Companies are leveraging nanotech manufacturing methods to grow graphene for thin-film supercapacitors that can be used as alternatives to electrochemical batteries. In most of these applications graphene is still being evaluated for efficacy, so it is not yet clear where it will gain the most traction.
One area that is seeing more immediate growth is in paints and composites. By mixing flakes of graphene into resins, the mixture can serve as a cheaper alternative to carbon fiber composites with the same or higher strength rating. And for paints the graphene is converted to graphene oxide so the nanoplatelet powders can be mixed into a liquid dispersant system and then sprayed or otherwise applied onto surfaces. These hybrid graphene products provide improved strength and conductivity using today’s application technologies, though have greatly reduced benefits as coatings or objects made with pure graphene.
Global Suppliers and Consumers
Graphene can be purchased online in bulk, but prices vary wildly with the quality level. But doing something meaningful with the samples once you receive them is a different story.
Pristine monolayer graphene is the highest quality product. For a single layer thickness, grown on a metallic substrate using CVD will cost $100–200 USD for a 1cm x 1cm square.
Few-layer graphene nanoplatelets are medium quality, consisting of tiny irregular flakes. These can be purchased in jars for approximately $10–20 USD per gram.
Multi-layer graphene powder or graphene oxide powder are the lowest quality and can be purchased for $0.10–1.00 USD per gram.
As you can see, the price varies by many orders of magnitude based on quality. Thomasnet estimates that the world market size for graphene production is approximately $640 million today. The United States is the largest consumer of graphene followed by Italy, Australia, UK, Canada, and China. Thomasnet has provided the following tables to show the largest producers and what their sales look like:
Conclusion:
In Part 1 of this article we introduce graphene and other advanced forms of carbon, describing what is amazing about this material and also what is holding it back in the marketplace. In Part 2 of this article we will explore how it is produced, production costs, and what advances are on the horizon.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing.
