After graphene was first produced at the University of Manchester in 2004, it was hailed as a wonder material, stronger than steel but lighter than paper. But two decades on, not every UK graphene company has made the most of that potential. Some show promise but others are struggling.
Extracted from graphite, commonly used in pencils, graphene is a latticed sheet of carbon one atom thick, and is highly effective at conducting heat and electricity. China is the world’s biggest producer, using it to try to get ahead in the global race to produce microchips and in sectors such as construction.
In the UK, a graphene-enhanced, low-carbon concrete was laid at a Northumbrian Water site in July, developed by the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) at the University of Manchester and Cemex UK.
“The material when it came out of academia was hyped to death … but the challenge is going from lab to fab,” says Ben Jensen, the chief executive of 2D Photonics, a startup spun out from the University of Cambridge that makes graphene-based photonic technology for datacentres.
Jensen also invented Vantablack coatings, made of carbon nanotubes – rolled-up sheets of graphene – and known as the world’s “blackest black” because it absorbs 99.96% of light, at the UK company Surrey NanoSystems that he founded in 2007. The material’s artistic rights were sold exclusively to the sculptor Anish Kapoor, and BMW used it on its X6 coupe to create the “blackest black car” six years ago.
View image in fullscreen An untitled Vantablack work by Anish Kapoor on display in Venice in 2022. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
“This is the challenge when you have new materials trying to displace an incumbent technology,” Jensen says. “The value proposition must be extremely good, but there also must be a way to manufacture the material and manufacture it at scale for the application … then you have to meet price expectations because there’s no point in delivering something that’s costing 10 times more than the incumbent.”
Germany’s Bayer tried to produce carbon nanotube products in bulk but shut down its pilot factory more than a decade ago after the expected surge in demand failed to materialise. The material is now mainly used as a filler to strengthen plastic products. The company described the potential applications of nanotubes as “fragmented”.
More promising are the graphene-based optical microchips developed by 2D Photonics’ subsidiary CamGraPhIC, which are based on research done at the University of Cambridge and Italy’s CNIT research institute.
At the moment, silicon-photonics microchips convert electrical data into optical data to transmit it through fibre-optic cables, but the firm says its graphene chips deliver more data in the same period of time and at far lower cost.
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