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  • Graphene - New Production Methods

    Meet the first lady of graphene, turning harmful gases into the wonder stuff

    Catharina Paukner is building a supersized graphene factory in Cambridge that can turn methane from landfill - or even cows - into modern-day black gold

    The Telegraph

    Rebecca Burn Callander
    12/6/2014

    Excerpt:

    The birthplace of graphene – the one-atom-thick carbon – is Manchester University, where it was created by two physicists. But Cambridge could become the adopted home of the so-called wonder-material.

    A vast new facility that can make up to five tonnes of the ultra-valuable black dust each year is being built in the city and is due to open in 2015.

    Cambridge Nanosystems, a university spin-out, led by chief scientist Catharina Paukner, 30, has built the factory with the help of a £500,000 grant from the Technology Strategy Board.

    “It’s mind-blowing to think that not long ago, it was only possible to make a ladleful in a year. Now we can make enough to fill a whole building,” she tells The Sunday Telegraph. “And we have the capacity to increase that 100-fold.”

    Graphene is one of the most interesting inventions of modern times. Stronger than steel, yet light, the material conducts electricity and heat. It has been used for a wide variety of applications, from strengthening Novak Djokovic’s tennis racket to building semiconductors.

    Paukner’s two-year-old company is leading the charge to commercialise graphene. She and fellow Cambridge alumni Krzysztof Koziol have devised a way to make the material in large volumes, without compromising on quality.

    Unlike existing graphene manufacturers that use graphite as their source material, or use a thermal process to bake it out of methane, Cambridge Nanosystems uses a patented plasma system to turn biogas into graphene.

    This gas can either come out of the pipeline – the same natural gas that is pumped into our houses – or using waste gas.

    “In America, they are starting to capture methane from cows and using it to burn for heating,” says Paukner. “But we could go one better, and convert all those methane hydrocarbons into a high-value product.”

    Graphene, in its raw state, is a fine black powder

    If the idea of strapping giant gas canisters to cows seems a little far-fetched, Cambridge Nanosystems has found a more immediate source of methane.

    “Landfill sites produce a lot of methane, which is a greenhouse gas,” she explains. “You can’t just let it into the atmosphere, so companies spend a lot of money flaring it off. This produces carbon dioxide, which is also bad for the planet. If we take that gas, we can make graphene, with water being the only waste product.”

    Cambridge Nanosystems is running a project at a biogas plant to prove it can create graphene using this process reliably and consistently.

    Cambridge Nanosystems was spun out to build equipment for the creation of graphene, but Paukner and her co-founders soon realised that graphene itself had the greatest potential.

    “The possibilities are endless,” says Paukner. “I’m passionate about applications for the building industry. Imagine radiators that you can spray on any surface. We can create a kind of black ink using graphene that can be painted on to a wall or a floor.”

    By attaching an electrical current to the painted area, conductive graphene heats immediately, warming the room. Plumbers would not have to install radiators, just a paintbrush, she explains.

    ...................................

    View the complete article, including photos, at:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...der-stuff.html
    B. Steadman

  • #2
    Graphene breakthrough: Analysts laud one-step process

    InvestorIntel

    Robin Bromby
    4/14/2015

    Excerpt:

    Dual liberation of graphene and graphite through a one-step process directly from raw ore: that is some claim, and one being taken seriously by analysts.

    In fact, two reports have just come out from Australian analysts on Talga Resources (ASX:TLG) that single out this company has being in a category of its own. For Canaccord Genuity analyst Tim McCormack the headline news is that “a transformational year lies ahead”. Warwick Grigor at Far East Capital (who has recently become a substantial shareholder in Talga) is predicting “extraordinary profits” ahead.

    The company had begun as Talga Gold, then moved to iron ore before hitting on graphite. Let McCormack tell the story from there: “TLG’s focus swung to graphite in early 2012 when it acquired a suite of assets in Sweden from a subsidiary of Teck Cominco … TLG originally focused on a conventional graphite development strategy; however, in February 2014, work carried out by the University of Adelaide (in South Australia) demonstrated that graphene could be directlt liberated from the ore of TLG’s Vitangi graphite project.”

    And the findings? The company’s laboratory tests has demonstrated that graphene can be directly liberated from natural microcrystalline graphite ore. This requires no crushing, grinding, or other processes that add costs.

    The process details have not been revealed, but Canaccord believes it to be a wet physiochemical process partly derived from conventional mineral processing techniques. But it is also the ore that makes this project different: the graphite from the Vittangi ore is unique and makes possible the extraction of graphene. Vittangi is one of the five projects owned by Talga in northern Sweden (the company yesterday released encouraging graphite drilling results from one of its other projects).

    Talga is about to begin within about four months construction in Germany of its demonstration plant. Says the report: “The demonstration plant will be the first in the world to commercially demonstrate true direct ore-to-graphene process technology.”

    In its report, Far East Capital makes the point that the significance of Talga is not so much being a mining company as a ”facilitator in the commercialization of graphene”. Grigor’s report argues that reliable and large-volume graphene has been a limiting factor in the development of graphene applications. Talga is, in his view, the only company to emerge so far that can offer production capacity measured in thousands of tonnes, and holds the key to scaleability in both production and applications.

    As he explains it, the Vittangi orebody is unlike any other graphite deposit. It was formed through lower intensity metamorphism which has left the deposit with unique crystallinity, but very regular structure and consistency. It is predictable over a strike length of more than 30km, offering mine life potential of more than 100 years.

    ................................

    View the complete article at:

    http://investorintel.com/technology-...-step-process/
    B. Steadman

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