Graphene is at the heart of the research surrounding superconductors, as well as many new projects.
At MIT, researchers are studying the substance’s reaction to electricity, in California, they’re looking at how it can be altered, and in China, they’re developing anti-bacterial socks with the material.
Recently, Rhode Island-based company HEX 6 Industries Inc. announced they had perfected and filed patents for their 100% green processes to exfoliate pristine graphene powder, flakes, and sheets.
Kerry Leppo, co-founder and CMO of HEX 6 Industries Inc., said the processes known as "The Laird Methods” are infinitely scalable and are capable of economically producing vast commercial quantities of pristine graphene.
Graphene is a superconductive material with the hardest and toughest crystal structure. Bruce Laird, Ph.D., co-founder and chief technology officer of HEX 6, led the team in these discoveries and said the advances will enable graphene to become a basic building block of industry, including aerospace, battery, and energy technologies, chip and electronic technologies, concrete and asphalt technologies, composite manufacturing, as well as medical devices and products.
According to Leppo, the discovery finally makes graphene affordable and accessible to use in many commercial applications. The current methods for making pristine graphene requires a significant amount of electric energy (hundreds of thousands of volts), toxic chemicals and acids to separate impurities when making graphene, which then have to be disposed of safely.
“We run on household current and we use only tap water to separate the impurities product,” he said. “The wastewater is air dried to be used as an abrasive medium for blasting rust and paint of metal and buildings, no waste.”
Leppo said Hex6 Industries, Inc. was founded in 2022 as a result of their experimentation with Graphene as an ingredient in radar reflective paint coatings for their aircraft company Transcendent Aerospace.
“Hex 6 Industries is a small pure science laboratory,” he said. “We specialize in nanomaterials and do not make or sell any end-user products, we only make technologies available to industries that wish to buy our processes for their markets.”
Leppo said over the next 18 months HEX 6 is building a larger piece of equipment to make larger batches of product. He said they also expect to close a transaction for the intellectual property for this process with a major US-based company soon afterward.
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This story has been updated to reflect Kerry Leppo's correct pronouns.
