that graphine is 30 times more sensitive than silicon but they consume a thousand times less energy technology is advancing at an exponential rate with new breakthroughs and Innovations all the time but it's not everyday a new material comes along with the potential to create a huge difference when graphine was first discovered in 2004 we were told the so-called super material would change the world but fast forward to the present day and has the revolution happened yet well I've come to a lab near Cambridge one of the world's first companies mass-producing graphine based Electronics deceive myself Professor sollin humph is the co-founder and chief scientific officer of paragraph a company designed around graphine its mechanical properties are being exploited ated and so it's being added to concrete and meant to make it stronger to TX in row to running shoes to tennis rackets to a lot of products like this and it has made inros into these other areas but the real promise of faster transistors just hasn't happened and faster computers and and faster mobile phones uh better energy consumption none of these had happened uh until we got involved graphine was first isolated in 20 04 by scientists Professor sir Andre gim and Professor sir Constantine novoselov at the University of Manchester during a chance Friday afternoon experiment using the so-called sticky tape method carbon comes in many forms called allotropes the most well-known being diamond and graphite in a diamond each carbon atom is connected to four other carbon atoms it's this extremely strong Arrangement that makes Diamond one of the hardest know materials in graphite each atom is linked to three others in layers of hexagonal shapes the bonds within the hexagonal sheets are strong but each layer is only weakly attracted to the next which allows the layers to slip by one another if you peel away layers of graphite you end up with a monolayer honeycomb lattice of graphine which is a single atom thick which is why it's known as a two-dimensional material it's very strong it's transparent um it's the best electrical conductor in the world it's a very good thermal conductor it's flexible and all these properties are in a single material and so people are really excited about it but there was a problem to overcome before graphine could be used in electronics in 2015 Professor humph was working on another material in Cambridge when a PhD student asked to focus on graphine I give her a piece of Gallum nitride and I send her up to Manchester uh to meet the Nobel Prize winner there and he gives her a little plastic box and he says inside this box there's a piece of graphine and what I want you to do he said is to make a transistor By Hand by putting this graphine on top of the gum nitrate and push some contacts on and she looks in the box and she says there's nothing there right and he said that's because it's transparent right and she spends a month trying to find this thing by Fe as it were with tweezers and then and then you know assemble by hand and she cannot do it and so I then get on the phone to cost noos off this Nobel Prize winner and I say cost I Supply some gum nitr which is 2 in in diameter please can you supply a piece of graphine which is 2 in in diameter because even though it's transparent you know there's a chance she can assemble a transistor by hand and he Roars with laughter and I say Costa this other on the end of the phone I say Costa why are you laughing and he said because device quality graphine 2 in in diameter doesn't exist anywhere in the world and because I hadn't worked in graphine before I didn't know that and he said there's just the tiny flakes so Professor Humphrey set his research group a task to find a new way of making graphine and then one of my senior postdocs who's now the CEO of this company um paragraph uh he came to me uh after about a month and he said Colin I've had an idea of a new way of making graphine and we made this large area graphine and then we made the first prototype what's called a h effect Center which paragraph is in manufacturing but uh you know for very little money and I happen to have the right equipment and the right people at the right time and we did this work the two postdocs were Simon Thomas now the CEO of paragraph and Iva gy the group's technical director paragraph is one of the world's first companies to mass-produce graphine based electronic devices oh wow this is an impressive bit of Kit what's happening here so we're just unloading the graphine samples here so each of those 2in Wafers has a single monol layer of graphine on it and this is how it looks and it as deposited form that's the graphine in each wafer each on each substrate yeah there are 31 wafers in here and um you can get over a thousand devices easily on a 2-in wafer like this so we're talking High numbers some of our reactors will be used for kind of high throughput high uniformity more production grade things and some of them will be used more for research and development so looking at smaller quantities of devices um and tailoring them to new applications and what's the process how dides that happen here we can see the fresh substrates being loaded in ready to be deposited with the graphine so they'll be loaded into here and then um it will be closed down and once it's closed down there'll be a series of uh conditions that are needed for the process to take place so basically some chemical precursors will um enter the environment with the substrates and the reactions that go on in there is what leads to the graphine being deposited the exact process is a secret but it works something like this a variety of gases containing carbon are injected into a chamber the gases mix when they hit a substrate which has been heated to over 1,000° C hydrogen is released and the carbon atoms skate around until they find each other and Link in a honeycomb array leaving a layer of high Purity graphine on the wafer what makes this method unique when you grow directly on your chosen substrate instead of on something else and then transferring the graphine later you can keep that graphine more intact and more protected and less contaminated by the different processing steps that you would need to move it around being able to grow on larger and larger areas of substrate will enable us to scale up and make millions of devices at a time the first electronic device paragraph is producing is a magnetic field sensor which works on what's known as the hall effect so here you can you can see an illustration of the processing steps involved to take graphine from its on wafer state to a finished device that can be used in different applications so here we can see a wafer much like what we saw in the reactor where there's a single layer of carbon atoms across that whole 2-in wafer so the graphine goes through various stages including adding other materials that are needed for the device structure we need to be able to contact to that device so that's where the metallization step comes in and you can see some contacts have been added there they connect the graphine to the rest of the system the devices are then singulated to give individual die with one device on each one and these are then placed into protective packaging and again this would all be connected with wire bonds so that you can measure with the device and what do the visuals here on the screen show so this animation here shows how the whole effect works in our sensor so if you imagine that red material there is the graphine and we have a current traveling in one direction through the material when that goes into a magnetic field as you can see coming in here the moving charge carriers are all experiencing a force that def FS them over to one side of the material so that causes lots of charge on one side and less charge on the other side so we measure that potential difference across the device that's shown by the voltmeter moving here and the amount of voltage that we measure from that potential difference depends on the field strength and the sensitivity of our material so we can use a device where we know the sensitivity to work out the strength of the magnetic field and you could move it around or use lots of different devices to map a field effectively how is this being used out there in the real world so you could use the sensor in a variety of applications where you need to either detect a magnetic field and that could be something really simple like whether a door is open or closed and you can use that in things like electric car batteries to work out where there are defects and prevent fires from happing or it could be used to map a very precise magnetic field such as you might need for medical applications or high level physics research what are the advantages of using graphine in these devices compared to the materials that are currently more widely used used graphine has loads of really beneficial properties for using in a hall sensor so the material itself is really sensitive to magnetic fields which means that we get a really good strong response and we can measure the fields very precisely the fact that graphine is only a single layer of atoms means that it's not experiencing any through thickness effects in the material so you get a much cleaner measurement of that magnetic field and graphing devices can also consume much less power so in the move towards more energy efficient devices graphine could really play a role with its integration another Advantage is that it can be used at very low temperatures which makes it ideal for use of machines like MRI scanners and quantum computers once the sensor has been assembled they're checked here and then tested under liquid nitrogen the hall sensors use a very small Cross of graphine between four metal contacts as seen here under a microscope paragraph is also producing another type of sensor a very exciting project being product being made here is a biosensor graphine biosensor is very very fast and can give you rapid results and we believe that you can uh distinguish between viruses and bacteria you can distinguish other different types of bacteria different types of viruses so there's something called sepsis which kills lots of people and to detect sepes at the moment you have to take a swab say saliva and you culture it and you culture the bacteria or viruses there and you then do analysis in electron microscope and that takes 24 to 48 hours we believe with a graphine biosensor you could determine that in maybe 10 or 20 minutes so it's going to change the world it's going to save lives Dr Martin Tyler is quality checking a batch of new bio sensors this is what the Wafers look like when they come out of our Fab we produce 32 devices on a 2in wafer that's kind of one device there and then that's another one so it's six rows and six columns seven so after this it will get sent through a cleaving process to singulate the dies so they then get attached to a PCB so that's a single device there uh y bonded out these tracks and then that whole chip and wire bonded assembly gets coated in an epoxy main to protect the wire bonds but with the added benefit it also produces this kind of um cavity or well that we can leave liquid in during our test what are the benefits of using graphing in this way so traditionally um in these sort of devices you'd be using you know 3D bulk materials um and one of the key improvements you get from graphing is that because it's a 2d material it's essentially all surface area so any changes to the surface is really a change to the entirety of the material so you get an enhanced sensitivity because of that this enhanced sensitivity allows for faster detection than traditional devices it's also possible to detect more than one virus or bacteria on a single device research is still underway to incorporate graphing into computers which should make them much faster but there is another Advantage too it turns out that graphine is extremely energy efficient and the uh these magnetic sensors I was just talking about before they're 30 times more sensitive than silicon but they consume a thous thousand times less energy and so if we can make transistors as in computers from from graphine from other two Dimension materials then they'll save a lot of energy the reason graphine consumes such a low amount of energy is due to electricity flowing through a layer of conduction electrons which exist above and below its 2D layer of carbon atoms and not inside the material itself as would be the case in a 3D structure and when graphing was discovered it was the only material in the world in which the conduction electrons moved on the surface since then we found another set of two-dimensional materials and theoretically I think 5,000 are now been found in theory and only you know a few hundred are been made of these special materials where the conductions just on the surface and we expect all of those will be low energy consumption materials so if you look at say what's going to be the future of paragraph and and the future of graphing the future of graphing is to look at other two materials as well because for certain sorts of transistors they may be even better than graphing and so yeah that's a huge prize for two-dimensional materials and may help us save next zero graphine was the first example of a 2d material in the real world many more have since been discovered such as borine Pine phosphorene goldine and pluming which each have their own set of unique properties and there are many more yet to be found 20 years since graphine was discovered the so-called Wonder material is slowly starting to live up to the original hype Manchester has become the UK's home of graphine and 2D materials research opening the National graphine Institute in 2015 and the graphine engineering Innovation Center known as The Geek in in 2018 John Whitaker is the group's engineering director where are we and what is the work you're doing here so the this building is the graphine engineering and Innovation Center uh it's heavily focused on Industrial applications so we're a part of the University of Manchester we work with our academic colleagues uh we say we're are industry-led here so industry dictates the work that we do in here but we also respect a huge amount of graphine research and 2D material research at the University of Manchester of which we get a constant academic feed and this is quite important for industry going forward so we use graphine as one example uh isolated 20 years ago National graphine Institute 10 years ago has now been feeding into applications we've set up the pipeline here at Manchester uh to do that with other 2D materials the reason why the graphine engineering and innovation Center is unique throughout uh the world is that it focuses on that application that proof of concept to the Prototype but working with the supply chain and The Regulators to ease the adoption here we are speaking 20 years on there was much said at the time about the potential for this material to completely revolutionize the way we live and work has that happened has it lived up to the height yes it has um in the last certainly in the last 5 years we've been delivering uh graphine and 2D materials Technologies to a huge uh wide range of industrial applications we're now reaching the stage where real applications and products are starting to emerge when a new material kind of comes along that can add value industry has to verify the data so it's got to be safe to use got to be safe to employ safe to work with and we're going through those application processes now it's called regulat compliance [Music] apart from Electronics graphine is mostly incorporated into another material to lighten and strengthen it it's been used in building materials such as concrete consumer products such as plastic bottles and in trainers and also in the automotive and Aerospace Industries an estimated 40 million products now contain graphine one of the big obstacles in bringing it to Market was the scalability of graphine production the good thing is only a small amount is needed for most products one example of graphine I like is 1 gr of graphine will cover a surface area of over 2,600 square m that's roughly the size of 10 tennis courts you only need a very very small amount of graphine in a system for example like a polymer or a battery system to have a significant effect uh and that's what we find in applications today the geek Focus focuses on working with industry and has six application Laboratories one area it's hoped graphine can make a difference is sustainability Dr Nikki sajani is the energy applications manager when you think about graphine first being discovered back in 2004 its use in better battery life was one of the big properties we heard being talked about has that really happened so this is the biggest challenge at the moment with the world pushing away from fossil fuels Battery Technology has been developed through an astonishing speed the problem is is implementing something as graphine which which was still not well understood at the time was difficult now that graphine has become a more established material there is now a clearer drive to get graphine materials into Battery Technology how is graphine actually used in these batteries a battery is not a simple system it's a number of components that are combined together that have to work synergetically to actually give the performance of the battery what graphing can do is it can improve performances of each component of a battery so if you're looking at storage capacity graphine helps increase it you're looking at Power delivery graphine allows for a higher power output without increasing the resistive losses it also helps reduce short circuits and dite growth which is one of the biggest dangers of lithium batteries which can cause fires and thermal runways so without being specific it can help every component of the battery incor operating graphine into batteries may solve one of the biggest obstacles in the transition to Greener modes of Transport electric vehicle range anxiety this is the concern about how far the vehicle can travel between each charge one of the bigger drivers for energy reset has being able to achieve the ranges that you can with internal combustion engine that 600 800,000 mile range graphing can help push that towards that in the short term but in the long term it will also allow for the generation of batteries that can achieve th plus miles as well as the different application Laboratories the geek offers facilities to scale up and test products at larger sizes so welcome to the the geek pilot Hall this is where we take our upscale activity so we've been to see some of our Laboratories where we go through the small scale to the one liter we start to go into the more industrial scale applications so as you can see we've got a lot of kind of overhead crane here a lot of what we called company R&D how rare is it to have this amount of space uh dedicated to getting graphing app it is it is very rare to have all the applications Under One Roof so there's a a number of applications that are in our application Laboratories but then to have a pilot Hall this allows us to drisk uh what we call uh applications drisk scale if you think of a company who then gets to a trial at 1 kg 10 kg 20 kg they have then got to start to accelerate this into a production the geek operates a partnership model at different tier levels offering companies including small to medium Enterprises access to a wide range of specialist resources to help bring their products to Market one such company is Vector homes Vector homes is really looking at two of the big you know challenges which our world faces today so the climate crisis and and housing inequality we had this kind of shared Vision around how graphine could be incorporated into some of these waste stream materials to produce something that is impacting you know you us our generation of of of of people and take me through the steps in which graphing is being used in their production of of the homes you're making what we're particularly interested on is looking at the elements of things like insulation or or non-structural elements where we can make improvements in their efficiency particularly around their thermal efficiency um but also looking at ways which we can do that where we reduce the embodied carbon that's associated with so we're looking at the whole life carbon of buildings so graphine is generally found in form of a powder or in sheets uh we don't produce graphine so we buy graphine in from supplies like first graphine um usually in the form not of powder but of something like what's called a master batch so that would be a material like this where it's already been loaded into a a carrier material in this case this is high density polyeth um so there it is is safe I'm fine to handle it with with with touch and it it's not a Airborne or anything like that um and then what we do is we then combine that with in this case things like postc consumer recycled plastic combining them together with an extrusion process and producing uh materials in the form of pellets these can then be formed into structures with injection molding or further Extrusion processes or even Ching processes as well so we can produce a quite wide variety of structures that all contain that beginning Gra 2024 is a big year for Vector homes they've just built a prototype of their affordable and modular home which they plan to roll out later in the year what are the wider benefits of using graphine for the construction industry and for house building the critical thing for us is one is is the multi-functional aspects that it brings so as a general statement what we're trying to do is reduce the overall weight or the overall mass of construction that's one of the primary ways that can reduce its impact on the environment so if we add in half a perent to 1% of graphing interior but can we save 20 or 30% of the overall mass that we're we're adding whether it's in foundations in structures in insulation um and then you build on top so that gives you one benefit but then if you build on top of that that you can then potentially enhance its thermal resistance and so on then you get you know this sort of multi-functional cascade effect that that generates multiple benefits as well as in the construction industry graphine shows much much promise when it comes to membranes that can be used for water filtration and desalination and also Coatings which could be used for packaging and preventing rust many more 2D materials have been discovered and are under development with single element materials such as borine Pine phosphine and goldine but there are also 2D materials made up of two elements J Jong beun is CEO of nanop plexus a company based at the geek developing the 2D material Maxine so we developed a material called Maxine uh with gone from sourcing the raw materials that are required to make it and become the leading manufacturers in the world at the moment and what is it so the simplest way to explain it it is a variation of what's people probably commonly know as graphine so we mix in a little B carbon based compound material with a metallic so what we end up getting is a powder like this that has very close to metallic properties the material is still in development but potential uses include batteries and energy applications and for smart textiles where the metallic properties can allow for sensory feedback the discovery of graphine has really um set the S of the the platform for us to to be able to develop new Next Generation materials and graphine is still going to be one of that I think it's a bit like in the kitchen where we have the rack of spices and hes I think it's going to be like that so every different partners or industry members are going to have different needs and it's going to be choosing that specific blend of whether that's graphine or Maxine or blend of both that will allow us to be able to meet the you know the criteria the parameters that every industry p is going to need the UK is not alone in developing graphine the US and China have also invested heavily in the materials research and China now produces the most globally recently scientists from tianin University made a breakthrough developing the world's first working graphine semiconductor the team led by Professor Marley with help from researchers at Georgia Tech University found the semiconductor about 10 times more effective Ive than silicon when tested 20 years on it seems the graphine revolution is underway with many exciting developments on the horizon but perhaps a more accurate title is the 2D materials transformation it's really exciting to be working on this material that has the power to revolutionize electronics and to be some of the first people to put that to use in real world devices what does the future hold for the work that you're doing here at parable up and more widely how graphine is being used well I think it is well changing because you know bio sensors can change the world of medicine and the electronic devices here the the transistors we want to make can change our world of computer I mean it really would make computers 2,000 times faster but I think even more important than that you know we could say we know on the devices we're making here we save a thousand times the electricity it's a thousand times L consumption we think the transistors of other two different materials which we haven't yet made will probably 100 times the lower energy consumption that 100 times will make it almost negligible when you use your computer and so on so I think you know we're really optimistic because what we're doing here could be world changing the huge abant [Music] [Music]
