Hi there, my names Noel Craig, I'm from Belfast in Northern Ireland and would like to ask the community here
about their experience with graphene as a potential additive in lightweight high strength composite 
materials. Alternatively perhaps you have heard about the material but have been driven away by the
shocking cost of it.

I ask because it has been the subject of personal research along with nano materials  for around two years now
and I have developed my own top down environmentally friendly and highly scale-able approach to it's production.
I am not here to sell my material but just to get an idea as to how common in usage the material has become.

Thanks
Noel

There have been a couple of members experimenting with it over the years, as well as carbon nano tubes etc.  However it is not in common usage yet.  We (as in EasyComposites) generally only hear about it through student and other industry research


Warren Penalver
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Support Assistant

Hi Warren.

Is expense the limiting factor for your business where adopting graphene is concerned, if so what price per kilo would I 
need to realistically accomplish before companies such as Easy Composites would be willing to take graphene as a 
viable option?

Don't worry, I can't go about making business proposals, I only have the ability to produce 1 Kilo at a mad push fortnightly
so I'm going nowhere fast right now but it would be nice to have a target to fight for.

Stocking of products depends a lot on demand.  At present, in the market we serve, there is very little.  Expense is not always a limiting factor.  Some materials and resins are by their nature, relatively expensive but where there is demand, the cost is not always a limiting factor. For example, board sealers are very expensive, and despite trying to source them as cheaply as we can, they still end up being an expensive product, but there is a set number of relatively limited used where that product works very well and hence a demand for it. 

I am not sure where that demand lies yet with graphene.   Certainly if we were being regularly asked for it, it would be a product we investigate further into sourcing. where appropriate.


Warren Penalver
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Support Assistant

All products I've got an overview on didn't accomplish any improvement through graphene so far. The companys always claim to achieve lighter/stronger parts using graphene, but in reality these products are just as light/strong as every other product of the same quality. In my opinion the trend to graphene label carbon products is already well past it's peak. As long as nobody shows significant improvements in the final product with graphene I think the use for graphene powder will stay where it is right now. At least for composites.

Thanks for the responses

Well.. it's not the news I wanted to hear though it is not entirely unexpected either.
It might be necessary for graphene to adopt sheet form before its potential can
finally be exploited at least where composites are concerned.

That's not going to happen for a very long time I suspect, but graphene still
has other properties that could be useful elsewhere. I have thoroughly tested
it as part of a thermal compound in a  heavily overclocked computer system
where it exhibits performance somewhere between copper and diamond. 

I was able to test the electrical resistance of my powder to 300 Ohms/cm2
so could be more useful in electronics at this time.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

If anyone can give me some examples where graphene has failed to deliver, this would be very interesting to me. I would not ask
for specific products or brands but rather examples of the type of product in which it was used and... where possible the percentage
of graphene included in the product. 

The majority of products I was talking about are sports equipment like bike frames, etc. The graphene didn't fail, it just didn't made any difference. The powder is usually added to the resin, to increase it's strength. The problem only is: the resin isn't really the strength critical component of a well made composite structure. Maybe it increases the resin characteristics, maybe it doesn't. It doesn't really matter anyways. The contend was fairly low, 2-5% I think.

2 to 5% does not sound terribly convincing to me, I wonder is it likely they chose such a low concentration because of the 
tremendous price tag that has been associated with graphene. I'd be more interested in seeing what 25% concentration does, not simply
from a point of view of strength but also in terms of weight savings.

I am able to do this because it is not my intention to charge £10,000 for a kilo of graphene  but rather was aiming
more towards the initial price of £600 per kilo with a view of reducing it to £300 per kilo as soon as I possibly can with the ultimate
goal being about £60 per kilo in the end.

I think I can achieve those goals, the only thing preventing me right now is a lack of equipment, particularly a 
half decent vacuum pump as it's simply taking me too long to clean and dry the material. 

How does the powder effect the physical nature of the resin? My concern using any sort of filler powder in combination with fiber reinforcement would be increasing the viscosity of the resin so much that it cant wet out the fibres properly. So 25% sounds like too much to me, but I've never worked with graphene before so I dont know how much it effects viscosity.