Nanocarbon Applications: Batteries, Coatings & Electronics

Nanocarbon Applications: Batteries, Coatings & Electronics

Klean nanocarbons are applied across batteries, supercapacitors, coatings, aerospace, construction, electronics and medicine.

A nanocarbon is only as useful as the problem it solves. Graphene-like structures, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes each bring a different combination of conductivity, surface area, aspect ratio and chemistry, and the application decides which of those properties is doing the work.

Batteries and supercapacitors

Energy storage is the largest pull on advanced carbon today. Conductive carbon networks govern how efficiently charge moves through an electrode, while high surface area governs how much charge a supercapacitor can hold at all. Single-walled carbon nanotubes contribute conductive pathways at very low loadings; fullerenes and graphene-like carbons contribute surface and electron-transfer behaviour. Klean produces all three from the same platform.

Coatings

Conductive, antistatic, barrier and protective coatings all rely on building a percolating carbon network inside a binder. The limiting factor is almost never the carbon’s intrinsic performance — it is dispersion. Grade selection and dispersion strategy are therefore where most coating projects are won or lost.

Aerospace and construction

Structural composites use nanocarbon to lift stiffness, strength and toughness without adding mass, and to add multifunctionality such as conductivity or damage sensing. Construction materials use it at the other end of the volume scale, where cost per tonne governs whether a reinforcement strategy survives contact with a bill of quantities.

Electronics and medicine

Electronics work draws on the fact that CVD growth at Klean yields both semiconducting and metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes — separate populations for separate device requirements. Medical research draws on fullerene cage chemistry and on the custom fullerene derivatives developed from Klean’s purification capability.

Supply, not samples

Full-scale output is approximately 7,000 tonnes per annum of nano-recovered carbon black plus 700 tonnes per annum of carbon nanotubes, from a platform that scaled from a 0.4 tonne-per-annum pilot in Japan in 2000 to a facility processing roughly 2,500,000 used tires a year. An application programme that works at laboratory scale therefore has somewhere to go.

Application notes, loading guidance, grade recommendations and volume pricing are released against a described use case. Start with the performance target and the annual volume.