A couple of weeks ago we visited Haydale's headquarters and production floor in Ammanford, Wales, UK. Here are our impressions following this visit, the meeting with Haydale's management and a visit to the production floor and processing rooms.
First of all, let's clear up a common misunderstanding: Haydale is not a graphene producer. It buys graphene materials (from several sources) and uses its proprietary plasma process to improve the materials, make them more uniform in quality and tailor them to specific requirements. Haydale then uses these materials to create intermediate materials - inks, coatings, composite materials (and masterbatches) and 3D filaments. Haydale is working with customers to take these materials and use them in various graphene-enhanced products.
Haydale's offices are located in a beautiful and scenic small business Park - surrounded by green hills. Haydale is quite close to Swansea University - from which it draws IP and talent. The company recently expanded and now occupies two buildings at the Park.
Personally we got the feeling that the company has several interesting projects in the pipeline, and commercialization is right around the corner - for the company's composites (with Hunstman, for example), inks and other products.
One interesting project that we learned about is the EU-funded Biography project, in which Haydale is collaborating with the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and other companies and Universities. Biography's aim was to develop a roll-to-roll printing process of graphene electrodes on large-area polymer foils to be used in biosensors for impedimetric or electrochemical measurements.
The Biography project successfully concluded and presented impressive graphene ink based sensor prototypes. Graphene inks can provide an affordable and efficient way to produce such sensors, and hopefully this project will lead to commercial sensors in the near future. For more information on Biography, click here.