Production of graphene using diamagnetic graphite ore

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Saint Jean Carbon, one of Canada's leading graphite mining companies, is currently planning to create a commercial manufacturing platform for graphene in order to take advantage of high value-added properties associated with this emerging material. Recently, Saint Jean developed a very unique product for the graphite market, called diamagnetic graphite. These materials find rich applications in levitation and electronic devices. However most conventional diamagnetic materials with high diamagnetic susceptibility are metals, which are both prohibitively heavy and expensive. Thus, Saint Jean is planning to explore ways to produce diamagnetic graphene material to meet and exceed the performance of their current diamagnetic graphite product. Conventional graphene production, using Hummer's method, does not apply to diamagnetic graphite ore as it only applies to graphite powder with particle sizes smaller than 10 µm. Grinding graphite ore to such a small size requires a ball mill, electronic sieve, and other expensive equipment and the process incurs high yield loss. Saint Jean will partner with Prof. Aiping Yu at the University of Waterloo to develop a new approach for diamagnetic graphene material production using the company's graphite ore. They will also work together to fully characterize the resulting material to ensure it meets performance expectations for commercial production. The developed technology will enable Saint Jean Carbon to have a new type a graphene produce, which will bring significant economic benefits to them. Moreover, the new knowledge and techniques developed for producing graphene directly from graphite ore will save the Canadian graphite industry millions of dollars in operating, equipment, and maintenance costs, but will also introduce new graphene products to the down-stream industry, including electronics, energy storage, plastic, coating and biomedical industry.