Last month we posted about Shanghai's Powerbooster Technology and their graphene-based flexible touch-panels for mobile devices. The company is using Bluestone Global Tech's graphene to produce those panels. BGT now posted a nice video showing these touch panels in action:
Markets and Markets released a new graphene market report ("Graphene Electronics Market: 2013-2023") in which they forecast that the total graphene technology market will grow at an estimated 55.54% CAGR (Compound annual growth rate).
The total graphene market will reach $100 million in 2018 - and it will be used in a range of applications including RFID, smart packaging, supercapacitors, composites, ITO replacement, sensors, logic, memory and others. Overall the market will remain rather small according to this report. While graphene may revolutionaize a lot of industries and enable new products, the forecast is not promising for graphene producers and suppliers.
American Graphite Technologies (AGT) announced that Cheap Tubes received independent test results for its hybrid bucky/graphene paper formulations and advanced coating technology, and these results confirmed that the materials are conductive, stable and processable on an industrial scale.
Cheap Tubes produced several pre-production quality, highly conductive, flexible and mechanically stable self-supporting membrane samples (made form CNTs and GNPs), refined from mined graphite and other nano components. Cheap Tubes' hybrid paper has a surface area of 116m2/g at 100um thickness, and the company says that it could potentially produce it in sizes up to 36" wide, at speeds up to 50-100 feet of membrane per minute.
Cambridge University's Graphene Centre (CGC) and Plastic Logic have signed a research collaboration agreement on graphene in flexible plastic electronics. Plastic Logic donated large scale deposition equipment to the CGC to support graphene development.
A flexible tiled 42" OTFT e-paper display, made by Plastic Logic
The co-research currently has three main activities:
The CGC was established in early 2013 with a £12 million grant from the UK government.
Powerbooster Technology (based in Shanghai) developed a graphene-based flexible touch-panels for mobile devices. The company says that graphene is cheaper and stronger than ITO (traditionally used for touch panels). The company plans to invest $150 million in the next three years in order to bring their solutions to the market.
Powerbooster is partnering with Bluestone Global Tech to supply them with graphene. They say they already started to produce these touch panels - in fact they claim that they already sell around 2 million touch panels per month, apparently to mid-sized Chinese smartphone makers (this is rather surprising, hopefully we'll learn more soon). They aim to get the first products with their graphene touch screens in the market by the end of 2013.
Haydale announced that it has developed new metal-free graphene-based inks. The HDPlas Graphene Ink Sc213 can be used to commercialize smart packaging, printed batteries, sensors, flexible displays (OLEDs and e-paper) and touch screens.
Haydale developed the new inks in collaboration with specialist ink manufacturer Gwent Electronic Materials (GEM). Those inks have been optimized for ideal viscosity and solid contents ensuring excellent coverage and exceptional conductivity. The inks are fully customisable and can be modified with development partners for specific requirements.
Researchers from Purdue University developed a new transparent electrode made from silver nanowires and graphene. ITO, which is currently used for transparent electrodes in touch displays is expensive, non-flexible, brittle and rare. Silver Nanowires is a promising material to replace ITO - and it is already being commercialized for LCD and OLED displays.
The researchers say that coating the silver nanowires with graphene sheets changed the resistance of the electrodes - which dropped to only 22 ohms per square (which is five times better than ITO which has a sheet resistance of 100 ohms per square).
A group of researchers from the University of Texas in El Paso (UTEP) developed a new technology to recycle water - based on graphene membranes. The researchers won $100,000 from the University of Texas System Horizon Fund Student Investment Competition and established a new company called American Water Recycling (AWR) to commercialize this technology. This follows an earlier $10,000 win in March 2013.
AWR claims that their graphene membrane can extract grease from water and clean it - and much faster than existing membranes. In fact, a regular membrane can process about 30 gallons a day, but the graphene based membranes will do 30 gallons per hous. AWR is now applying to a $300,000 state grant that will allow them to test the membrane in a year-long trial at a septic-tank pumping company in Las Cruces. According to their business plan, they will reach $33 million in sales in the next five years and will also develop other water-treatment and water-recycling products.
Korean researchers developed a transparent (84.5% transmittance) actuator that can be used to make movable elements for touch-screens and vari-focal lenses. The actuator is made from a dielectric elastomer layer sandwiched between two transparent and stretchable graphene electrodes (and a frame that links the materials to the substrate).
The researchers demonstrated how this actuator can be used in a tactile display. They also showed that the device can work even when stretched to 25% of its length.
Bluestone Global Tech (BGT) was founded in 2011 in New York with an aim to produce graphene. The company offers high-quality, fully customizable graphene on several substrates (Quartz, Copper, Silicon and others). BGT's CEO, Dr. Chung Ping Lai, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had about the company's business and technology.
Dr. Lai became BGT's CEO in November 2012. Previously he worked with Taiwan's ITRI institute, Veeco, Applied films and other companies. Dr. Lai received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Ceramics Science and Engineering of Rutgers University in 1992.