It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's... Graphene?
Graphene is a miracle material with the potential to revolutionize textiles.
A thin flake of carbon, just one atom thick, it's not only the thinnest material ever but also the strongest. It conducts both heat and electricity, and is almost completely transparent. Yet it is so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it.
Caption: 3D Rendering of Graphene Molecular Grid
Research into the various uses of graphene across many industries has advanced apace. It’s now used in solar panels, screen technology and batteries.
Adoption in textiles has been a bit slower but now seems to be picking up. Graphene can be used as a coating, covalently bonded into fiber itself, or added to apparel and other items as a conductive material for advanced wearables and sensors.
Let’s start with wearables – with everyone talking about the Metaverse, connected wearables might even advance beyond their current role into a more expansive virtual reality role.
About the Metaverse
So what is the Metaverse? It's basically an immersive virtual world in which participants use virtual and augmented reality headsets to socialize and game. At least that's what it is right now. However, its uses are bound to expand with the technology.
Just like a social media presence has become essential for brands, so too will the Metaverse. And some experts are saying the time is now to start exploring how. We think that graphene will have a role to play, although exactly how much of a role is still TBD.
How Can Graphene Benefit Textile Products?
According to First Graphene, a leading supplier of graphene products sold under the PureGRAPH product brand, “The addition of graphene products to textiles can create a wide range of enhanced properties. For example, graphene-enhanced textiles are stronger and last longer, have excellent wear-resistance and thermal management. Not only can [graphene] improve the resistance to wear, abrasion and tearing, it also provides greater thermal and electrical conductivity. This opens up possibilities for smart textiles, wearable sensors and applications for data transmission.”
Thus the potential connection to the Metaverse.
Caption: Graphene blended yarn and fabric
It should also be noted that a great deal of work is ongoing with respect to graphene use in batteries. This is important in wearables, since a key limitation today is the weight and bulk of the power source for smart wearables.
As one researcher pointed out to me, no one wants to lug around a pound of batteries in order to monitor their performance during a run. The promise of graphene-based power sources is that they are not only more durable and lighter weight, but they are more sustainable as well. There’s still a ways to go before graphene enters the average person’s daily life. But it’s coming, and it will make a huge difference in many regards.
Another benefit of adding graphene to textiles is its antibacterial properties. This paper published by the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, provides more detail, but the bottom line, they found, is that “antibacterial tests show that [Graphene Oxide] GO-containing fabrics possess strong antibacterial property and could inactivate 98% of bacteria.
Most significantly, these fabrics can still kill >90% bacteria even after being washed 100 times. Also importantly, animal tests show that GO-modified cotton fabrics cause no irritation to rabbit skin. Hence, it is believed that these flexible, foldable and re-usable GO-based antibacterial cotton fabrics have high promise as a type of new nano-engineered antibacterial materials for a wide range of applications.
In other words, enhancing fabric with graphene is an important means of creating smart textiles with all kinds of advantages over traditional fabrics, even fabrics that are coated with other materials for specific purposes. The standard for most fabric coatings is that they survive 30 to 50 washings, and as we saw from the above research, graphene is still functional after 100 washings. In the case of covalently bonded graphene for fibers such as Kyorene from Graphene One, it's functional forever. Graphene One also tested toothbrushes enhanced with graphene, and found that a normal toothbrush, after two weeks of use, has a total bacteria count of over 700,000; while the graphene-enhanced toothbrush only had 600. Makes you think differently about common items like a toothbrush.
And you don’t need to add much graphene for it to have an effect. For example, in the world of building materials, you only need to add about 33 grams of graphene per metric ton of concrete to strengthen it, according to The Graphene Council. Kyorene can be effective with as little as 1% graphene in the fiber, although more may be used depending on the desired results.
Graphene is especially gaining popularity for use in enhancing athletic apparel, whether it is adding strength to fabrics that undergo a significant amount of stress during usage, for thermal or odor control or to create smart athletic clothing.
According to ACS Material, a provider of graphene, it “allows users to monitor their performance and health, including heart rate and optimum movements. Additionally, there are developments in progress to improve carbon fiber composites with graphene, which could be highly useful in sports equipment such as ski jackets and trousers for example.”
The company also touts graphene’s thermal properties.
“Graphene’s thermal properties have revolutionized the sport and athletic textile industry. The material acts as a filter between your skin and the environment, expelling heat in warmer weather and preserving and evenly distributing body heat in colder climates. Graphene-enhanced fabrics have the potential to reinforce the natural way in which we adjust our body temperature, all while remaining breathable and comfortable.”
Man of Steel?
Well, graphene won’t make you into Superman or Superwoman, but it is truly a super material. ACS notes that graphene, even though composed of one layer of carbon atoms, thinner than a single human hair and invisible to the naked eye, is 200 times stronger than steel. It’s also non-toxic and hypoallergenic. It truly is a miracle material, and we are only on the ground floor of its use in textiles and apparel. If you think your products can benefit from graphene, now is the time to get moving.
