Graphene tech: Fighting the pandemic with sensible tech

GRAPHENE, the wonder material of the 21st century, is creating a lot of excitement in the scientific neighborhood and market circles. This niche material offers an very versatile benefit to pretty much each market ranging from manufacturing aircraft to producing health-related sensors, from the filtration membranes for air and water to supplying robust antimicrobial properties for textiles. It also offers superlative power storage upgrades to batteries, supercapacitors, and hybrids.

One nicely-identified house of graphene is that it is one of the strongest nanomaterials present in material science. It is only one atom thick, that is, a thousand occasions thinner than human hair, and has robust antimicrobial activity. Also, it has higher electron mobility and thermal conductivity at area temperature along with higher flexibility.

Jaipur-based nanotechnology firm Nanomatrix Materials (NM) is working on the massive-scale manufacturing of this niche material and its derivatives and obtaining special applications for them in the field of filtration, power, building, coatings and significantly more.

“Nanomatrix Materials is one of the first companies in the country that specialises in the integration of graphene into a number of applications and creates a value-added proposition,” says its founder Vikas Bardiya. He, along with Arvind Bhardwaj and Anupam Kumar (two skilled nanotechnology researchers, also co-founders of Nanomatrix Materials) make a robust group who visualise, conceptualise and synthesise nanomaterials in material science. The firm partners with numerous market players in the domains such as filtration, polymers, building, power, and textiles to resolve their special challenges by means of the wonderful properties of graphene nanotechnology.

Nanomatrix Materials is the R&ampD and B2B arm of the Bardiya Group which specialises in manufacturing graphene and integrating it for additional worth-added applications. “Our expertise lies in digging deeper into the subject. It took years of knowledge and research which includes expertise from the US and EU to finally come up with a solution for sustainable and scaling up graphene manufacturing,” says Bardiya.

The beauty of graphene is that it can be functionalised in a quantity of strategies, says Bardiya. For instance, graphene can be modified to be a fantastic or negative insulator. “There are a number of use cases that are being worked upon across the globe and some companies have even come up with various end-use products for the costumers. For example, graphene-based batteries, coatings, etc. Not only this, graphene is used as an additive in many industries such as consumer electronics, sensors, water filtration, textile, rubber and tyres, polymers, oil and many more.”

Nanomatrix Materials has created a quantity of sophisticated nanomaterials options across sectors which incorporate textile, marine, electronics, mechanical, and so on. “One such application that we came up with is NMG-Tx, a patented graphene-silver technology which is strongly anti-viral and anti-bacterial. The membrane developed by using nanocomposite is very effective in face masks including non-surgical face masks and N95 face masks and air filters,” says Bardiya, adding, “In the prevailing pandemic one of the major concerns is the safety of health workers thus, providing them high quality of protective equipment is the need of the hour.”

Bardiya says, “Our G1 Wonder Masks are currently the No. 1 bestseller in fashion category on Amazon. We have invested Rs 5 crore in this project. We have also started exporting to different countries including USA, UAE and Thailand.”

G1 Wonders is the customer merchandise wing (B2C) of the Bardiya Group which shall quickly have its presence in on the web as nicely as the brick-and-mortar retail space, says Bardiya. “We have been receiving orders for our masks across the country, especially from metros. We are expanding our network and currently we are present in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kerala, Kolkata and a few tier 2 cities,” he adds.

In the next 12-18 months, the firm plans to create merchandise in the field of air and water filtration, marine disaster management, power, petroleum, textiles, polymer, building and environmental clean-ups.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz