Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like pattern, is regarded as the world’s thinnest, strongest, and most conductive material for both electricity and heat. These remarkable properties are capturing the attention of researchers and businesses globally, with the potential to revolutionise entire industries including electricity, conductivity, energy generation, batteries, sensors, and more.
As the world’s strongest material, graphene can significantly enhance the strength of other materials. Researchers have demonstrated that even a trace amount of graphene added to plastics, metals, or other materials can make them much stronger or lighter, as less material is needed to achieve the same strength. These graphene-enhanced composite materials have potential applications in aerospace, building materials, mobile devices, and various other fields.
Graphene also excels in thermal applications due to its unparalleled heat conductivity. Its combination of strength and lightness makes it ideal for heat-spreading solutions like heat sinks or heat dissipation films. This can be particularly useful in microelectronics, such as improving the efficiency and longevity of LED lighting, as well as in larger applications like thermal foils for mobile devices. Notably, Huawei’s latest smartphones have incorporated graphene-based thermal films.
The extremely high surface-area-to-volume ratio of graphene, owing to its status as the world’s thinnest material, makes it a promising candidate for energy storage solutions, including batteries and supercapacitors. Graphene may enable these devices to store more energy and charge faster, with potential applications even extending to fuel cells.
Beyond mechanical strength and thermal applications, graphene holds great promise for a variety of other uses. These include anti-corrosion coatings and paints, efficient and precise sensors, faster and more efficient electronics, flexible displays, efficient solar panels, faster DNA sequencing, drug delivery, and more. Given its fundamental properties, it appears that virtually any industry could benefit from this revolutionary material. However, only time will reveal the full extent of graphene’s impact and whether other new materials might prove to be more suitable.
Tirupati Graphite PLC (LON:TGR) is a fully integrated specialist graphite and graphene producer, with operations in Madagascar and India. The Company is delivering on this strategy by being fully integrated from mine to graphene. Its global multi-location operations include primary mining and processing in Madagascar, hi-tech graphite processing in India to produce specialty graphite, and a state-of-art graphene and technology R&D center to be established in India.
