The city of Manchester, UK, is gearing up for a graphene jamboree. Graphene Week 2015, which kicks off on 22 June, is sure to delight its more than 600 attendees with a conference and celebrations of the ‘wonder material’. Graphene’s commercial future, however, is much less certain.
The atom-thin flakes of carbon are being produced in record volume and have found their way into a handful of eye-catching gizmos. But experts fret that graphene production far exceeds requirements, and that the material offers only marginal benefits over incumbent technologies in many of its target applications.
“There’s a heck of a lot of production capacity and not much demand, because we just haven’t seen any compelling technologies coming through,” says Ross Kozarsky, a senior analyst at market-intelligence company Lux Research, who is based in San Francisco, California.
That will most surely change in the very near future. To read more, click here.