The European Commission has just approved a 1 billion funds for the graphene industry on January 28th. Graphenea, a European company based in CIC nanoGune Nanotechnology Center, is already leading the market and takes part in the "Graphene Flagship Project".
The 10 year scheme will provide fundings for this special area of nanotechnology and advanced electronics. Graphenea will be able to invest even more to improve the production of graphene for industrial sectors as broad as flexible and transparent electronics, batteries, displays, or even health.
The Graphene Flagship project includes 74 partners among which Graphenea is the only graphene films producer involved. Other partners include large companies like Philips, Varta, Nokia, ST Microelectronics, Repsol, Alcatel-Lucent or Airbus among others.
Graphenea aims at being at the edge of novelty and technology to lead an expanding market : "Graphene is a revolutionary material that could impact in several industrial markets like batteries, solar cells and LEDs" says Jesus de la Fuente, Graphenea's CEO. The company has thus decided to implement an active strategy resolutely focused towards industrial applications and research. The two main goals of the employees are to satisfy high-quality demanding customers and to develop increasingly pure graphene films that could also be tuned for specific applications. Indeed, Graphenea produces mainly CVD graphene films and liquid exfoliated graphene oxide.
Chemical Vapor Deposited represents nowadays the most industrial scalable method to produce high quality graphene films. After evaporation of carbon on a copper foil, the method allows transfer of the mono atomic crystal sheet to a broad range of substrate. Graphenea is the first to offer this material for commercial applications at affordable prices. Its pilot line is producing 50,000 cm²/year and the team plans to extend it to an industrial-scale production line with capacity of more than 130 millions cm²/year This large amount paves the way to a spreading of graphene in daily life products like sensors, high-frequency transistors, flexible and transparent electronic chips, batteries or solar cells.