In 2016, researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics captivated Brad Larschan with a demonstration.
They asked him to put a glass football in a bowl of ice. As soon as the glass and ice touched, the entire ball matched the ice’s temperature.
“I couldn’t believe what I had experienced,” Larschan remembered.
The reason for this, the researchers explained, was because the glass was coated with graphene — an elastic, extremely lightweight carbon allotrope that is not only one of the world’s strongest materials but also one of its best conductors of heat and electricity.
It was Larschan’s introduction to graphene, and he quickly realized its potential.
“I thought, this is revolutionary, because all the different things that can be enhanced with graphene,” he said. “You can imagine what it can be.”
These days, Larschan is trying to help make that vision a reality as CEO of the local startup Avadain, which plans to license out a graphene manufacturing process to advanced material manufacturers.
Before it can do this, though, the company must upscale the process and prove its effectiveness. So, it’s gearing up to launch a $5 million crowdfunding campaign, which Larschan estimates should be enough to open a pilot plant that demonstrates its potential to prospective clients.
By 2029, he and his team project that they’ll have ten licensees.
But their prediction begs a question — why are they so confident companies will select their manufacturing process?
Graphene, not graphene oxide
Larschan is far from the first to be excited about graphene; scientific and technological circles have been tantalized by its promise for years.
In 2010, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their experiments with the material. In 2019, the online publication TechRadar ran an article titled, “40 Ways Graphene is About to Change Your Life.”
Because it’s such an effective electrical conductor, it can make batteries more efficient, potentially bringing significantly faster charging times to smart phones and electric vehicles.
Larschan asserted that if you add one half of one percent of graphene to a supercapacitor — which sits between an energy source and a battery — you can “pretty much double the performance.” In 2017, Samsung revealed a graphene battery material that enabled five times faster charging speeds than standard lithium-ion batteries.
Because it’s stronger than steel, yet remarkably lightweight — graphene is considered the world’s first 2D material, according to the University of Manchester — mixing it in with aircraft materials could substantially reduce the weight of airplanes. That would also make aircraft more efficient and reduce their carbon footprint.
And because it’s so elastic, graphene could make products more flexible in the future.
“You can imagine the day, where you can fold up your smartphone like a napkin or roll it up and stick it in your pocket,” Larschan said. “All of those things become probable because of graphene.”
But there is a caveat: manufacturing high-quality, defect-free graphene is difficult.
Since graphene is a carbon allotrope, and carbon atoms bond to oxygen atoms, many often end up producing graphene oxide — which is great, Larschan said, if you want to reinforce concrete.
But it can hamper some of the material’s most intriguing abilities. For example, oxygen interrupts the flow of electrons through graphene, making it significantly less useful for batteries.
“If you have the oxygen defects in the graphene flakes, then it doesn’t do nearly as well [conducting electricity]. In fact, it’s a very poor conductor of electricity,” Larschan said. “And graphene is as nearly as perfect a conductor of heat as you can get … whereas graphene oxide really wouldn’t conduct heat very well.”
And this is where Avadain comes in.
Spinning off from Bastille
Larschan is also the CEO of Memphis-based Bastille LLC, which works with universities and research institutions to identify and commercialize technologies they’ve developed.
The Fraunhofer Institute asked Bastille if it would support its concept on developing high-quality graphene flakes, a request that led to the football and ice demonstration.
After this, Bastille wanted to capitalize on graphene’s potential, and asked its funding partner, Panasonic Corp., to invest in the project.
Panasonic agreed, and with the funding, the Fraunhofer Institute was paid to create a process that would manufacture large, thin, and defect-free — or nearly defect-free — graphene flakes.
Once the process was developed, it was turned over to Panasonic and Bastille, and they used it to spin off a separate company, Avadain. The new company will upscale the manufacturing process and license it to manufacturing firms, which will in turn produce graphene flakes to meet demand.
“It was a slow process that built up over the last five years, and the culmination of it is what we have today,” Larschan said.
Currently, Avadain is closing a $500,000 seed round, and the bulk of this money will be used to fund digital marketing efforts for the $5 million crowdfunding campaign.
The goal is to kick off the campaign by the end of this month and finish it in 90 days, but this isn’t a surefire bet. As Larschan noted, he’s never tried crowdfunding before.
He is, however, confident in the startup’s manufacturing process — and the material it will produce.
“This unleashes the graphene revolution,” he said. “When you think about the potential here, we’re limited by our own imaginations. The potential of graphene is beyond any one person’s ability to conceptualize today."
