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UNIVERSITY CITY
Imagine a material that's invisible to the naked eye, ten times stronger than diamond,
incredibly flexible, impermeable to gases and the world's best-known conductor of
electricity. It's called graphene, and a Philadelphia company is poised to revolutionize its
production.
Graphene grabbed headlines in 2010, when two physicists from the University of
Manchester in the U.K. won the Nobel Prize after isolating specks of carbon only one
atom thick. Subsequent experiments confirmed what scientists had believed for
decades: The anatomically thin samples -- graphene -- had incomparable physical
qualities.
Flakes were great for research, but as sheets, graphene has the potential to revolutionize
medical science, consumer electronics, and our ability to generate and store renewable
energy.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the seeds of Graphene Frontiers were being sown. A.T.
Charlie Johnson, head of a nanophysics laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania,
and postdoctoral researcher Zhengtang Luo were working together on a novel
production technique. They designed an "Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapor
Deposition" (APCVD) -- a process common to the semiconductor industry -- for making
graphene sheets.
Inexpensive, plentiful graphene is poised to send ripples through the supply chain and
enable flexible organic electronics to come to market. This new consumer technology -which uses carbon-based polymers instead of copper or silicone -- promises ultrathin,
flexible, sun-powered consumer devices and sheets of solar panels printed in rolls.
Johnson and Luo's company, Graphene Frontiers, is among the first manufacturers of
commercial-grade sheet graphene in the world. The company began atPenn's UPStart, a
program dedicated to technology commercialization. They eventually hired CEO Mike
Patterson, a Wharton MBA and former SVP of global delivery for Bank of America.
In 2011, iCorps accepted Graphene Frontiers into their first cohort and the company
worked with entrepreneurial giant Steve Blank. In 2012, they opened their headquarters
at the University City Science Center's Port Business Incubator. Graphene Frontiers
receives grants from the National Science Foundations Small Business Innovation
Research Program and has earned an additional $500,000 in angel investment.
"You could do a lot with this material if you could manage to make a lot of it," says
Patterson. "Thats what [Graphene Frontiers] does. We have a way to make large-area
pieces of graphene relatively cheaply."