Sweden's Grafren launches G-Heatex for powerful and uniform heat

They have the unique technology for separation of high-quality graphene flakes from any grade of incoming material. Grafren is a spin-off from Linkoping University to bring graphene products to the market.

“Our method secures/guarantees the required quality of the incoming graphene material for production process, thus, enables access to low-cost and wide range of graphene suppliers.  The access to the high quality graphene enabled the next invention at the company – graphene textiles,” explained Erik Khranovskyy, CEO.

“We invented the method to incorporate smallest flakes of graphene inside of the fabric on the nanoscale level,” said Grafren’s technical director Dr.Mike Zhyback.

Graphene nanoparticles – flakes - are impregnated inside the fabric and coating, entirely layer by layer every individual textile fibre. Such a structure is completely unique and is possible only due to graphene flakes two-dimensional geometry. Because of high electrical conductivity of graphene, attached flakes create a conductive skin on every fibre - which makes the entire fabric electrically active. Graphene can be coated on diverse textile substrates and the electrical resistance can be tailored depending on the application requirements, Grafen said in a press release.

“Our graphene textiles offer excellent electrical conductivity and are extremely lightweight and soft. Being metals-free, they are stable in aggressive media environments, are non-allergic to humans and particularly good for the environment – since in the process we are using only water and graphene, ” said Khranovskyy.

Graphene textiles can have many applications in diverse industries – defense, aerospace, healthcare or mobility/automotive due to the number of functions it possesses. At present Grafren focused on the heating function of the fabric – and created the world's first fully textile electrical heating elements. Such elements are still a textile – soft, thin, lightweight, but can deliver powerful and uniform/homogeneous heat.

“In our case the whole fabric surface is radiating/emitting heat – thus we have a large area of heat. Therefore, it is possible to deliver large amounts of heat without necessity to reach high temperatures,” said Sandra Knopik, business developer at Grafren.

“The novel heaters can be used for outdoor clothing, for keeping the batteries warm at sub-zero temperatures or even as a part of interior in the electric vehicles,” said Sam Issa, the marketing director at Grafren.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)