Editor’s note: This is Part Two in a series on the research and development work of a team of scientists led by Dr. James Tour of Rice University. This story focuses on the superior features and benefits of turbostratic or flash graphene, as well as Universal Matter, the company Tour and his team created to scale up the manufacturing of the product. Part One in the series is here.
When a new technology emerges, it requires at least two elements to guarantee its success.
First, it needs to be superior in product quality to the market leader in its field.
Secondly, it must be less expensive, or at the very least price competitive, with the dominant technology in its market niche.
With these two benefits, the new tech is poised to successfully compete and perhaps even supplant its competition as a market leader.
We’re going to look at a specific new technology through these two lenses. The technology is Flash Joule heating.
Flash Joule Heating is a process that produces a material known as turbostratic graphene, better known as flash graphene. The company that owns the technology is Universal Matter, Inc., based in Houston, Texas, and Ontario, Canada.
If you’ve read part one of our series on flash graphene, you have a sense of how special this material is, as well as some idea of its incredible potential in a variety of fields. Let’s now delve into the key factors that will determine its success.
Advantages of flash graphene
A half-dozen advantages of turbostratic/flash graphene stand out:
- The process costs dramatically less than current methods of manufacturing graphene.
- A broad spectrum of inexpensive carbon sources such as waste plastics, coal by-products, and even food waste can be used as feedstock in the Flash Joule Heating process that creates turbostratic graphene.
- Flash graphene’s turbostratic structure makes it far easier to uniformly disperse the material into composite materials.
- When added to composite materials such as concrete, flash graphene dramatically strengthens the composite. It also improves a variety of materials in different ways, and new enhancements continue to be discovered.
- The environmental advantages of flash graphene are far-reaching.
- The list of potential applications for flash graphene continues to grow with new ventures springing up to take advantage of the technology.
Significantly lower production costs
The Flash Joule process requires electricity to create the extremely high temperature “flash” that transforms carbon-based material into graphene. However, that flash is short-lived, a few seconds or less.
According to Dr. James Tour of Rice University, the main sponsor of the research surrounding the technology, the cost of the electricity to process one ton of coal into turbostratic graphene is $30-35.
Moreover, “you don’t have to wash the [feedstock] composites or anything,” Tour says. “It just burns everything else away. The flash process requires no solvents, no water, no purification. The electrical flashing cost is $30 to $35 per metric ton…That’s it and it’s because we’re not heating a furnace. We’re putting all the energy into the material in a very short amount of time…At the current price of $60,000 to $100,000 per ton for graphene, that is a huge upcycle.”
In contrast, the high price of graphene now being manufactured, which is the crystalline variety made from mined graphite, currently limits its commercial application to certain industries. Automotive and oil and gas are two such industries.
Many inexpensive feedstock sources
Materials used to manufacture flash graphene, as noted above, are wide-ranging and inexpensive.
The Flash Joule manufacturing process also dramatically benefits the environment by recycling big-problem materials such as waste plastics. “We are using composites of all types” as the feedstock for the flashing process, Tour noted in a YouTube video.
“Many inexpensive carbon sources, such as coal, petroleum coke, biochar, carbon black, discarded food and mixed plastic waste can produce turbostratic graphene (TG),” according to Universal Matter. “The process uses no furnace and no solvents or reactive gases.”
“This technology and additional developments are expected to support broad adoption of graphene across several major industries,” the company’s website notes.
Uniform dispersion into composites
Compared to crystalline graphene, the turbostratic structure of graphene produced by Universal Matter Inc. allows it to mix or disperse more easily into other materials.
This is because the misaligned layers reduce the van der Waals forces [forces of attraction] between the graphene flakes, making them less likely to restack or clump together. As a result, turbostratic graphene can be more uniformly distributed within a host material.
Enhanced material properties
When turbostratic/flash graphene is added to other materials, such as concrete, it significantly improves those materials’ properties. For concrete, the inclusion of graphene can dramatically increase its strength, durability, and resistance to water and chemicals.
This is due to the high surface area, exceptional mechanical properties, and the efficient load transfer capabilities of graphene flakes.
The ability of flash graphene to easily disperse in other materials opens up a broad range of applications. Graphene could enhance the properties of plastics, metals, and other composites, which could make them lighter, stronger, and more conductive.
This has implications for the construction, automotive, aerospace, and electronics industries, among others.
A growing list of product applications
“This technology and additional developments are expected to support broad adoption of graphene across several major industries,” according to Universal Matter.
Added to concrete, a small percentage of turbostratic graphene acts as a reinforcement agent at the microscopic level, increasing the concrete’s resistance to water, chemicals, and physical stresses. The strength alone increases by 30 percent.
In batteries and supercapacitors, flash graphene can improve energy storage capacity and charging speeds. Its high surface area and electrical conductivity allow for more efficient ion exchange and electron flow. The result is lighter, faster-charging, and more durable batteries.
Adding flash graphene to plastics, metals, or other materials can create composites that are lighter, stronger, and more resistant to heat. These composites could revolutionize automotive and aerospace design by providing materials that improve fuel efficiency and safety without sacrificing performance.
Flash graphene can be used in water purification systems to remove contaminants and salts more effectively than current filtration materials. Its layered structure and chemical properties allow it to absorb substances such as heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants.
The wonder material can also be used in thermal interface materials to improve heat dissipation due to its excellent thermal conductivity. This could enhance the performance and durability of electronic devices, LED lighting, and even thermal management systems in electric vehicles.
Due to its flexibility and conductivity, flash graphene can also be integrated into wearable electronics. This application could lead to advancements in medical monitoring devices, as well as in other products.
Environmental advantages of flash graphene
On its website, Universal Matter details a host of potential environmental benefits of flash Graphene:
“Graphene has the potential to provide a significant environmental advantage to the human race by strengthening, and therefore reducing the volume used, of many of the raw materials we use every day: concrete, asphalt, plastics, rubber and paint to name just a few,” the company’s website notes.
“For applications where the volume cannot be reduced, graphene promises to significantly improve the life cycle of products. For example, graphene in asphalt has been shown to increase the life of a road by 300%. Universal Matter will deliver all of these advantages with less graphene thanks to its superior purity and dispersibility of its turbostratic graphene.”
Another environmental boon could be the use of fly ash as feedstock to make flash graphene, Tour noted. “What happens after you burn coal is you are left with the inorganic portion that includes silicone, aluminum, calcium, and iron. This is what’s called fly ash. We have mountains of fly ash in the United States from many, many years of burning coal. It is considered toxic waste. We can take fly ash and we flash into graphene, and we also get out the Rare Earth elements.”
Another significant environmental benefit involves the production of so-called green hydrogen, a valuable fuel source, as a by-product of the Flash Joule Heating process.
Dr. Tour has made some dramatic assertions that the Flash Joule process can produce clean hydrogen for negative dollars when the sale of its core product, flash graphene, is factored into the cost/price equation. More on this in a future story in the series.
Speaking of environmental advantages, it needs to be pointed out that at present, most bulk-scale graphene is produced by a top-down approach through the exfoliation [separating layers] of graphite. This often requires large amounts of solvent with high energy mixing, shearing, sonication, or electrochemical treatment.
While chemical oxidation of graphite to graphene oxide promotes exfoliation, it requires harsh oxidants and leaves the graphene with a defective perforated structure upon the subsequent reduction step.
In comparison, flash graphene manufacturing is night-and-day cleaner than crystalline graphene production.
A short illustration from Dr. Tour gives us a great visualization of the process and its remarkable environmental benefits:
“It’s hard to compete with virgin plastic in price,” Tour said. “Recycled plastic is usually about the same price or a little bit more than virgin plastic, depending on where oil prices are. It’s because the human involvement in the separation. That’s the biggest thing.”
“We don’t separate anything [in the flash graphene process].” Tour said. “[We] throw all the plastics together. Flash, boom, graphene. So the mixture all forms graphene.”
This illustrates “linear versus circular economy: Linear you get raw materials, you produce, you use, you throw it out. Circular economy you just keep reusing it. That’s where want to be—in a circular economy.”
And that’s what the Flash Joule Heating process is: a real-life example of how a circular economy works.
Because this technology is new, proprietary, and highly valuable, some of its details are closely guarded by Universal Matter. The company does have a patent pending on the process.
Here’s a sampling of the current unknowns and future challenges regarding the technology:
- Neither Tour nor Universal Matter have divulged how much flash graphene is produced from a specific quantity of carbon-based material, such as coal, the coal mining waste product fly ash, or waste plastic.
- It’s also unclear how far along the company is in its scaling of the technology. They have not published how much carbon-based material a single flash process can handle in the current iteration of the process.
- As this technology is in its infant stage, scaling up from the quartz tube shown in the drawing above to a container that can handle flashing waste material at 2,800 C in volume is an engineering challenge for Universal Matter, the company Tour’s protégé Duy Luong and others launched.
- Infrastructure, transportation, and sales challenges remain for Universal Matter. There are lots of possible scenarios as to how flash graphene will be brought to market. Co-locating flash graphene manufacturing facilities with large carbon-rich feedstock sources such as coal facilities and recycling centers is one such idea that is bound to be explored at some point.
- Another good problem Universal Matter might face along the way is rapidly expanding demand for their flash graphene, as new applications for the material are researched and developed. That is now happening at a rapid rate.
A promising future for flash graphene
Though there is no clear picture yet of how flash graphene will impact the future, Dr. Tour has shared enough detail to piece together a picture of Flash Joule Heating’s features and benefits. And frankly, they’re awesome.
Stay tuned for the next episode in the flash graphene story where we explore more amazing product applications for this wonderfully versatile material.
