Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - 12

graphene

The shape of things
to come
It could be argued that graphene failed to live up to the initial hype, but it's back and it's
ready for prime time. Julian Buckley spoke with Neill Ricketts, CEO of Versarien, to find
out more about this unique material and how it can benefit the plastics industry

L

ike many before him, including Bill
Gates with Microsoft and Jeff Bezos
with Amazon, Neill Ricketts started his
company in his garage.
Through 2010, Ricketts had been involved with a project which offered "huge
promise" but that venture ultimately came
to nothing. The frustration behind this
experience served as motivation to form
Versarien, with the goal of helping universities to successfully commercialise new
technologies instead of them being buried in academia.
Having formed the company in 2011, in
2013 Versarien was listed on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange. Since
then, each successive year has seen the
company make a key business acquisition.
Many of these buyouts have been related
to the automotive sector, following Ricketts' own career background, but others
were technology development companies
working on projects in cooperation with

12

WWW.PRW.COM | november/december 2019

various universities.
It was one of these purchases which
led the company's foray into the world of
graphene.
As a brief primer, graphene is a material made up of carbon atoms. Arranged
in a hexagonal lattice, the material can be
just one atom thick. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who first discovered
graphene while working at the University
of Manchester, were awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 2004.
As the thinnest material known,
graphene has some very special properties. It is about 200 times stronger than
steel (by weight), while also being an excellent conductor of heat and electricity.
The material is almost totally transparent.
Although research is continuing to look
at potential applications, it has already
been used to improve the performance of
a series of products, including batteries,
transistors, processors and chips, supercapacitors, water filters and solar cells.



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Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019

Contents
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - Cover1
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - Cover2
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - Contents
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - 4
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - 5
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Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - 11
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - 12
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Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - Cover3
Plastics & Rubber World - November/December 2019 - Cover4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crain/prw_20190911
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