From ink to batteries, startup Vorbeck gets creative with the next silicon: graphene
Graphene has been called tomorrow’s silicon because of its conductive properties, cheap price and attractive traits like being strong and thin. But because the use of graphene in electronics is so new –- it was first made less than a decade ago by University of Manchester researchers – there aren’t a ton of ways to make the stuff commercially at scale yet....Graphene-based battery
But a startup out of Jessup, Maryland, called Vorbeck Materials, is one of the leaders in both producing graphene and also dreaming up products from batteries to wearables that can be made using the so-called miracle material. Vorbeck was founded in 2006 to commercialize a proprietary graphene material developed by Princeton chemical engineers Ilhan Aksay and Robert Prud’homme, and the company has a ton-scale factory churning out graphene in Jessup.
There’s a bit of a graphene gold rush happening right now, with a flurry of patents being filed, and Lux Research estimates that graphene will grow from a paltry $9 million market in 2012 to a $126 million market in 2020 — that’s a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent. At the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Summit this week, I got a chance to check out four novel products that Vorbeck worked on in conjunction with partners....
Graphene can also be used as an additive in batteries to give them more energy density (amount of energy they can store), boost the charge rate, and increase the cycle life. In conjunction with Princeton and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Vorbeck has been working on graphene-based battery technology. The ARPA-E awarded Vorbeck a $1.5 million grant to develop a lithium sulfur battery for hybrid vehicles....MUCH MORE
Previously:
The 2010 Nobel prizes: Physics--Graphene Researchers Geim and Novoselov Win
Andre Geim First in History to Win Both the Nobel and the IgNobel Prizes
Nobelprize.org interviews Physics Laureate Geim about his Ig Nobel
"10 Companies Reinventing Our Energy Infrastructure"
Some Guy Named Sir Konstantin Sergeevich "Kostya" Novoselov, FRS, HonFRSC, FInstP Sets Out a Graphene Roadmap
