Graphene, a previously little-known concept has been hotly hyped in China in recent years, "graphene news" has been heard endlessly, and related companies have sprung up like mushrooms overnight. front row".

However, amid the hustle and bustle, Jiangyin City, Jiangsu Province quietly erected a large "graphene three-dimensional factory" of 100,000 square meters. When a reporter from "China Economic Weekly" went to the local area for research recently, the owner of this large factory, Dai Jialong, chief expert of China Carbon Valley Technology Group Co., Ltd., was installing and debugging the equipment before the factory was put into use.

"In the past 8 years, we have worked hard and never participated in the hype of the concept, because although graphene is a new material that subverts the tradition, its preparation, mass production and application are by no means easy - investing huge sums of money to build large-scale three-dimensional factories and cooperate with them. The co-construction of an engineering application center by the National Nano Center shows that this is a great and arduous scientific task."

The "Material Expert" Dominating the Synthetic Mica Market

"China Economic Weekly"'s current analysis and prospect of "two-dimensional materials", its profound knowledge and rigorous thinking, make people have to seriously think about how this entrepreneur relies on superhuman understanding and perseverance to dominate the world synthetic mica market , and what kind of confidence to cut into the field of graphene from a high starting point.

According to Zhang Linxing, mica is widely used in industrial products, and its downstream industries include pearlescent pigments, insulating materials, thermal insulation materials and refractory materials, so it is known as "industrial monosodium glutamate". In 2002, due to keenly foreseeing the market prospects and firmly grasping the relevant technologies, Dai Jialong returned to his hometown Jiangyin City and started to build his first mica factory. At the beginning of the business

Merck, a German company founded in 1889, has chemical products widely used in special effects car paint, cosmetics and most of daily necessities. The small factory in Jiangyin with only a few factories and more than ten workers has almost no chance of entering its "eyes". Dai Jialong, however, firmly believed that his products could be "icing on the cake" for Merck. With this confidence, he found the China office of this Fortune 500 company and won valuable cooperation opportunities.

However, on the first day of work after the Spring Festival in 2009, an accident almost ruined the company's future - Merck suspended the product purchase agreement because some products were defective due to the excessive fluorine content of the purchased raw materials. Facing the loss of millions of orders and the alienation of high-quality customers, Dai Jialong made up his mind to produce synthetic mica by himself, and solemnly promised to overcome the worldwide problem of "fluorine control" within 100 days. At that time, almost no one believed that he could succeed. "Everything in the world is interdependent, and I don't believe that there is no way to deal with the fluorine content." After numerous failures, the European standard for the fluorine content of 30ppm in synthetic mica sheets was rewritten as Dai Jialong's. ≤25ppm.

"China Economic Weekly" reporters mentioned his thinking of "mutual generation and mutual restraint" countless times. However, the reporter clearly felt that between the "gut" and "knowledge", no one in the global industry has so far been able to "crack" his precise control technology of fluorine content. The reporter checked Dai Jialong's 47 utility model patents, 2 domestic invention patents and 1 international invention patent in the field of synthetic mica, but he has never seen the "low fluorine mica sheet" project, "This is my industry. The right to speak must be firmly held in the hands

Since then, the company has become the world's largest synthetic mica production base with its unique technology and special equipment to bring about special manufacturing processes and ultra-high yields. Giants want graphene to keep pace with synthetic mica

The data show that graphene is a planar two-dimensional material with a hexagonal honeycomb lattice composed of a single layer of carbon atoms, with a theoretical thickness of only 0.34 nanometers. It has excellent thermal conductivity, mechanical properties, high electron mobility, and large With properties such as specific surface area, it is the material with the highest strength, the best conductivity, the best heat dissipation and an excellent modifier in the world so far. It has broad application prospects in the field of new materials and new energy. "The king of new materials in the 21st century", therefore, all countries in the world are sparing no effort to promote the industrialization of graphene. Several Opinions on Accelerating the Innovation and Development of the Graphene Industry", it is necessary to basically establish an industrial system with benign interaction of key links such as graphene material preparation, application development, and terminal application in 2018, and improve this system in 2020.

Because it belongs to the same two-dimensional material as synthetic mica, graphene naturally aroused strong interest of Dai Jialong, although the research and development of graphene was still in its infancy, and there were few successful cases. Dai Jia told China Economic Weekly: "With years of experience in two-dimensional materials, I think graphene is 'nanomaterial + two-dimensional material + properties of graphite itself'. Both graphene and mica are layered minerals. The material is similar in structure to synthetic mica. Since I can synthesize mica artificially, why can’t I prepare graphene? The question is how to cut in from the high-end and form a technical barrier that is difficult for peers to surpass.”

Developing a graphene project faces two major problems. The first problem is the preparation process of graphene. In the past 8 years, more than 40 sets of tooling equipment have been trial-produced, and various graphene preparation methods commonly used in the industry have been tried, but satisfactory results have not been obtained. These common methods have many problems, such as: the yield of graphene prepared by the supercritical method is very low, and the production process has potential safety hazards; because the redox method cannot be completely reduced, the product structure has "irreversible" defects, and it is difficult to form a two-dimensional plane. , and the chemicals used in the peeling process will pollute the environment, which will greatly reduce the key properties of graphene; while the CVD method is a carbon film formed by depositing carbon-containing compounds such as methane, which has no lateral tension and no structural density. Only the longitudinal cutting force is too expensive and can only be used in some special fields. Therefore, Dai Jialong "grafted" the inspiration generated in the production of mica sheets, but after thousands of tests, the product still has technical defects such as low solid content, low yield, high energy consumption and poor stability.

Just when it was almost desperate, this world-leading peeling technology solved the problem of "qualitative but not quantitative" that has plagued the graphene industry for a long time, with high yield, short process lines, low energy consumption, low cost, and product Good quality and stable quality. At present, the company's graphene pilot line has been completed, and the products have begun to be used in power batteries, anti-corrosion coatings, high-strength composite fiber materials, and radiation-proof composite fiber materials. The test results of several authoritative institutions show that the company's graphene has been leading the industry in many aspects.

The second issue in developing graphene is downstream commercial applications. "China Economic Weekly", since the discovery of graphene, the industry has been working hard to develop the commercial use of this material, such as graphene energy storage materials, graphene anti-corrosion coatings, graphene polymer composite materials, graphene anti-UV radiation protection materials ...in the next 5 to 10 years, it is very likely to trigger major breakthroughs in related fields and drive emerging industrial chains worth trillions of dollars.