Huawei this month announced a major breakthrough in the field of lithium batteries , the industry's first high-temperature long-life graphene-based lithium-ion battery .
In recent years, Huawei has invested heavily in graphene, making this new nanomaterial a hot technology topic for Chinese people. Ren Zhengfei, president of Huawei, once confidently stated that graphene will trigger a technological revolution in the next 10-20 years and become a "black technology" that "completely changes the 21st century."
So, what kind of new material is graphene? Can it really change the future?
"Net Red" in the new material industry
Graphene is a quasi-two-dimensional material with only one atomic layer thickness. A long time ago, physicists predicted that the quasi-two-dimensional crystal itself is unstable in thermodynamic properties, so it cannot exist alone. Until 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom isolated graphene from graphite, confirming that it can exist alone, and the two won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Known as the “king of new materialsâ€, graphene is a two-dimensional honeycomb-like pure carbon material that combines many features. It is currently the thinnest and lightest material and the strongest and hardest material. Although graphite is very soft, single-layer graphene materials are even harder than diamond. The well-known diamond has good thermal conductivity, the thermal conductivity is around 2000 W/mK (thermal conductivity), and the thermal conductivity of graphene reaches 5300 W/mK. Graphene also has the characteristics of flexibility, transparency, and only protons can penetrate. These excellent properties give the graphene material a very broad application prospect and are the root cause of attracting the world's attention.
Although graphene continues to “swipe†on the news side, commercial products that can truly perform their characteristics have been delayed.
Huawei announced the "graphene-assisted high-temperature lithium-ion battery", according to Li Yangxing, chief scientist of Huawei's Watt Lab. In high-temperature batteries, graphene plays a role in heat dissipation rather than the positive or negative electrode material of the battery. Although this is not a graphene battery, according to information provided by Huawei, the performance of this new battery has been able to kill most of the lithium batteries currently on the market.
The mobile phone industry may be subverted
Huawei's glory Magic mobile phone released in Shenzhen earlier this month, using "graphene-assisted high-temperature lithium-ion battery" technology, officially promoted 30% of the battery in 30 minutes.
For mobile phones, graphene is of great significance. If the mobile phone chip is made of graphene, the performance will be greatly improved and the power consumption will be greatly reduced. If graphene is used for the two poles of the mobile phone battery , the endurance will be more than ten times that of the ordinary battery; if the capacitor device is made of graphene, The smartphone can be charged in minutes; the graphene has the characteristics of light transmission and flexibility, and if it can be used on a mobile phone, it can produce a flexible screen mobile phone and a full transparent mobile phone.
More than just Huawei, Samsung, Apple, and Nokia have become increasingly fierce in the graphene field. One of Nokia's most eye-catching applications is the use of graphene to make high-performance ultra-thin camera sensors.
The gap between ideal and reality is big
In fact, for graphene materials, the ideal and reality are very different. The ideal graphene has a perfect honeycomb structure, and the actual graphene is like a piece of broken clothes, which is made up of numerous graphene microchips. There are many defects on graphene, and there are a lot of dirty things. Therefore, the performance of graphene materials prepared by reality is not so good and the value is not so high.
The heavy investment of enterprises has not made the real industrialization of graphene. In addition to the small-scale production of graphene products used in the LED industry by domestic enterprises, the rest of the research institutions and enterprises can only produce in small batches. Also used mainly for research institutions.
The domestic graphene industry is in the primary development stage, the process level is not high, and the enterprise is difficult to profit is the two major factors that hinder the development of graphene industrialization.
From the technical point of view, how to prepare large-area, high-quality, high-quality graphene in batches is one of the difficulties. At present, the whole industry is still in the product development stage, and only a few enterprises can produce high-quality graphene on a large scale. The non-performing rate affects the downstream application promotion.
In terms of profit, the cost of graphene acquisition is still high, and the application market has not been fully opened, which makes it difficult for graphene companies to obtain stable profits, and the natural scale is not obvious. In the future, these companies need to integrate upstream and downstream industry chains to reduce costs and increase sales.
Many countries invest in research
At the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued the "Several Opinions on Accelerating the Innovation and Development of the Graphene Industry". It is expected to form a complete graphene industrial system in 2020 to achieve standardization, serialization and low cost of graphene materials. To achieve large-scale applications in multiple fields.
Although China has the dual advantages of rich reserves and policy support in graphene research, as the cradle of the birth of graphene, the UK has a thicker research in this field. More than 40 companies have collaborated with 235 researchers at the University of Manchester on research on graphene and related two-dimensional materials last year, and have spawned thousands of independent companies around.
The United States, Japan, and South Korea are also leading the way in innovative research on graphene. The US policy support for graphene projects is mainly concentrated in the research and development of graphene transistors, graphene supercapacitors , nano-graphene composite electrodes for lithium-ion batteries, and high-sensitivity sensors. Foreign technology giants are accelerating the industrialization and application of graphene. IBM, Samsung, etc. have already begun to study the application of graphene.
IBM is one of the most active companies in the development of high-speed transistors using graphene at the channel level. In 2008, the first graphene transistor was produced. In 2011, an integrated circuit made of graphene wafers was developed. Graphene computer chips have taken a big step forward.
In terms of product competition, South Korea's Samsung is also in a leading position. Samsung has nine core patents on the working mode and structure of graphene transistors, and many research projects have been on the road to productization.
Nokia began researching graphene in 2006 and participated in the European graphene flagship project in May 2011. In February 2013, it received funding of $1.35 billion. Nokia is working on the development of graphene light sensors. Graphene is very sensitive to light, so using graphene as a camera, its sensitivity will be 1000 times higher than that of a normal camera.
Technical patent litigation or outbreak
Recently, Liu Zhaoping, director of the Patent Committee of the China Graphene Industry Technology Innovation Strategic Alliance, made a 2016 patent work report.
Liu Zhaoping said: "According to Derwent's patent database, there were 14,000 patents for graphene in the world in April 2015; as of December 6, it rose to 27,000, doubled. China's patents in 2015 4 The month is 8,000, and the specific figure is 16,844, accounting for 60% of the world."
There are many patents in the field of graphene in China, and the problem cannot be ignored. Liu Zhaoping said: "The number of graphene patents in China exceeds that of Japan, South Korea and even the United States. However, careful analysis of the quality of patents reveals that there are not many core patents applied for in China, and there are too few sources at the source. Chinese patents are really useful. Less. Once there is a patent dispute, it is very unfavorable to China, and there should be measures to deal with it now."
There are currently nearly 20 graphene industrial parks in the country, and this number is still growing. Graphene industrial parks are being built in both developed and remote areas. Faced with this wave of “graphene gold rushâ€, Liu Zhongfan, a professor at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering of Peking University and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out that with reference to past history, there should be no rationality in the process of research and development and industrialization of new materials, and the graphene industry really grows. It takes time to accumulate, requires constant investment, and requires patience.
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