Avadain receives $3.77 million grant to upscale its graphene flakes tech to mass production

U.S-based graphene flakes producer Avadain has announced that it will upscale its environmentally friendly process to mass production as part of a two-year project funded by a $3.77 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).

We are excited to unleash the Graphene Revolution by making large, thin and nearly defect free graphene flakes available in industrial volumes and acceptable cost, says Bradley Larschan, CEO of Avadain.

We are very pleased with Avadain’s progress, says Takuya Tanaka, President of Panasonic Intellectual Property Corporation of America, which was the initial backer of Avadain’s technology. We are also gratified with the Commerce Department’s recognition that Avadain’s high quality graphene flakes can be upscaled to meet the need for industrial quantities of this super material.

The NIST grant will also fund demonstration of two critical coronavirus response applications of Avadain’s high quality graphene flakes. Project partner Flextrapower will use Avadain’s flakes to create affordable, high performance, breathable, N98+ graphene-improved filtration respirators.

Additionally, the University of Arkansas will substitute Avadain’s high quality flakes for graphene oxide to demonstrate significant improvements in low cost and accurate portable graphene-based biosensors to detect live coronavirus in real time in situ.

We have already shown the significant benefits of our graphene flakes in supercapacitors, says Phil Van Wormer, Avadain’s CCO. This project will also demonstrate the effectiveness of Avadain’s graphene flakes in two other critically-important coronavirus applications.

The upscaling of Avadain’s graphene flake manufacturing technology will be performed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas.