National Graphene Institute reveals first results with industrial partner

The first official experimental results since the National Graphene Institute (NGI) opened in March have been produced. The novel collaboration between industry and academia is exploring the production of graphene in the first stage of a long-term project. Morgan Advanced Materials joined forces last year with The University of Manchester - where graphene was first isolated a decade ago - to explore the potential of the material, with a full-time team based at the University's National Graphene Institute (NGI) . Morgan is one of the Institute's first industrial partners. The project is gathering pace, with early work focusing on scaling up Manchester's patented technology to produce graphene. This process sees molecules driven between the layers of a graphite electrode to separate them. The process is radically different from chemical vapour deposition (CVD) methods, which are used to grow individual graphene layers upon a substrate, and generally require high processing temperatures with low throughput.