The Fun Part: Graphene Applications...

With the exciting research of the material Graphene being highlighted be almost every University with a technology department, it did not take long before the ears of industry pricked up, and sure enough the research and development departments of hundreds if not thousands of companies kicked into action with this fantastic new material.

The usual large corporations such as The Military, The Medical Groups, Microsoft and NASA to name just a couple are already constructing prototypes using graphene, I for one would love to see the advances in medicine that we will take place over the next decade due to graphene. 

Now here is the exciting part for us mere mortals. Graphene as we know is an excellent conductor of electricity, and with its transparency being a key feature this material will basically revolutionise screen technology.

Here are a few examples of the sort of products that are under development by companies such as Apple and Nokia.

The Nokia Morph Phone:

 Flexible Mobile Phones:

Nokia Smart Phones:

 Scroll Out Laptops:

 Microsoft Ultra fast Chips:

With all of the applications we see graphene being used in, its uniqueness is highlighted throughout. You can see how the technology that we use today will be shaped and changed in the future. All of the limits that we have had before to restrain certain designs will be lifted, size, weight, strength all of these controlling boarders have been pushed back by this special substance. 

One thing that we find very exciting is not the simple Apple style re-invention of existing products, but the invention of brand new products that have been sat on a designers monitor in a R&D lab and could not be brought to life yet due to the shortfall of our previous modern materials.

Imagine if you will, a designated wall of your lounge coated in a wall paper thick transparent sheet invisible to the human eye that is your ultra HD Television Screen, this will also be able to have an ‘In Display’ PC Monitor Screen that you could move around the screen and situate it where you want it to be, after use you will be able to roll up the screen into a thin tube the size of a fishing rod. This would seem like science fiction but in reality this giant screen idea is only a matter of years away from us. 

Graphene OLED's.

Researchers at Stanford University have successfully developed a brand new concept of organic lighting-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with a few nanometers of graphene as transparent conductor. This paves the way for inexpensive mass production of OLEDs on large-area low-cost flexible plastic substrates, which could be rolled up like wallpaper and virtually applied anywhere you want.

 

Due to its superb image quality, low power consumption and ultra-thin device structure, OLEDs have been developed for more than 20 years, and is recently applied in ultra-thin televisions and other display screens such as those on digital cameras and mobile phones. OLEDs consist of active organic luminescent structure sandwiched between two electrodes, one of which must be transparent. Traditionally, indium tin oxide (ITO) is used in this type of devices. However, indium is rare, expensive and difficult to recycle. Scientists have been actively searching for an alternative candidate.

The next generation of optoelectronic devices requires transparent conductive electrodes to be lightweight, flexible, cheap, environmentally attractive, and compatible with large-scale manufacturing methods. Graphene, a single layer of graphite, is becoming a very promising candidate due to its unique electrical and optical properties. Very recently, Junbo Wu et al., researchers at Stanford University, successfully demonstrated the application of graphene in OLEDs for the first time.

Junbo Wu, the leading researcher of the development, said that they achieved OLEDs on graphene with performance similar to a control device on conventional ITO transparent anodes, which is very exciting and promising for real-world applications. ‘The current report by Wu et al. puts forward a strong case for graphene as a transparent conductor given its competitive performance, even with significantly high sheet resistance.’ said Chongwu Zhou, professor at University of Southern California in the Perspective of ACS Nano, 4(1), 2010.

‘Graphene has the potential to be a transparent electrode with higher performance, which means it is more transparent and more conductive. It could also be orders of magnitude cheaper than conventional transparent conductors, like ITO. It really has the potential to be both better and cheaper.’ said Prof. Peter Peumans in Podcast Episode 30, ACS Nano January 2010. ‘It (graphene) does have an additional advantage that the electrode is very thin, only a couple of nanometers thick, which potentially gives you much more freedom to design your devices.’ Peter also added.

This research sheds light on the enormous potential of graphene, and opens up an entirely new avenue towards the development of efficient and economical transparent conductors for flexible optoelectronic devices, such as OLEDs and organic photovoltaic cells. Transferring of large-area graphene thin film to a foreign flexible substrate has been previously demonstrated. Combining these technologies together, we have good reasons to expect graphene OLED products on flexible plastic in the near future.

The research is published in the journal ACS Nano, 4(1), 2010, entitled ‘Organic Light-Emitting Diodes on Solution-Processed Graphene Transparent Electrodes’. The authors are Junbo Wu, Mukul Agrawal, Hector A. Becerril, Zhenan Bao, Zunfeng Liu, Yongsheng Chen and Peter Peumans.