Overcoming the Status Quo: Unleashing the Full Potential of Nanomaterials
Nanotechnology has made significant progress in the last couple of decades and now impacts a number of industries—from aerospace to clothing, construction, consumer electronics, and many more in between.
The integration and adoption of nanomaterials has not been without its challenges. In fact, there have been different types of challenges over the years, ranging from scientific to social, regulatory, and economic challenges.
However, many of the challenges have been overcome within the industry and have disrupted the status quo in a number of adjacent industries. Here, we look at how this has been done over the years.
Costs are often a challenge at the beginning of a nanomaterial’s commercial journey
One of the key challenges has been cost. Creating many nanomaterials—including nanostructured surfaces—requires complex synthetic and fabrication methods. These methods are often small-scale, so scaling up can sometimes be challenging and it means that many new nanomaterials are very expensive when they first hit the market.
This changes as the technology creating the nanomaterials matures, but the high initial prices can often be a commercial barrier that puts off some industries using nanomaterials—even when the price has come down as manufacturers will move on if they think that the nanomaterials are not going to be commercially viable.
The costs don’t also finish there. There can often be economic barriers to entry for many end-use applications—especially in electronics applications such as batteries. The testing requirements to disrupt the status quo when bringing new materials into technology fields can be very expensive. This can often lead to a stalemate in the new adoption of nanomaterials because no one wants to shoulder the financial risk if the tests don’t go as planned.
Over the years, the economic and financial challenges have primarily been solved via collaboration and cohesion within the industry. New manufacturing methods that are cheaper and larger scale emerge because of greater demand.
This has been shown with materials such as graphene. Over the years, the whole industry has come together to propel the industry forward, and the creation of a wider ecosystem has worked wonders. There are now many more graphene manufacturers, graphene product manufacturers, and end-users in other market sectors that are now using graphene thanks to a tighter and more cohesive industrial ecosystem.
There are now many collaborations between graphene manufacturers and end-users, and many products are now coming out thanks to these collaborations showing the performance benefits in small-scale trials rather than just focusing on the economic factors. This is something that has been happening across all areas of nanotechnology, not just graphene, but it is happening on a global scale for graphene now and across many different market sectors.
The barrier to entry into high-tech markets has been much harder, but many nanomaterial companies are now starting to make their own products to showcase to interested parties rather than going to end-users directly with a material that they could potentially integrate.
It is industry specific though, and some industries have been much more receptive than others to trialling and adopting nanomaterials, but most nanomaterial-based products hitting the market now are either thanks to nanomaterial companies making their own direct products and going straight to market or through collaborations with the end user—where the relationship becomes more than just a buy and sell endeavour. There has even been movement in the automotive battery market, with Mercedes Benz working with Sila Nanotechnologies after their silicon nanoparticle anodes showed great promise.
Challenges with the regulatory landscape
Another component is to follow a robust regulatory path to commercialisation. Nanomaterials are much smaller than other materials and can behave in very different ways than bulk materials—this is both in their general properties and how they interact with the human body (which is what regulations are there for and often based around).
The small size of nanomaterials means that they penetrate deeper into biological tissues than other materials do, making the regulation process fundamental to approvals. This has led to important regulatory pathways have been put in place over the years from an occupational safety standpoint around how different nanomaterials should be handled.
There have also been worries around the high aspect ratio (the width-to-length ratio) of some nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes, as it was initially thought that they could behave like asbestos when exposed to humans.
Now, while no one is saying that you should go around ingesting or inhaling nanomaterials, a lot of work has been done around the safety of nanomaterials in manufacturing environments and in different products to ensure the benefits are achieved but mitigating risk .
Nanosafety studies have come from all angles. There are academic studies which tend to centre in on certain focal points. You then have the wider industrial regulatory studies, which are often also done in conjunction with academic institutions and third-party testing sites (such as the National Physical Laboratory in the UK).
There have been a couple of key examples where the Nanotechnology innovation sector has come together to further regulations and standards in Nanotechnology.
The first has been through EU-funded (often Horizon 2020) projects—such as NanoReg and NanoReg2—which have looked at the entire value chain of nanomaterials and have implemented safe by design concepts across this chain—from the nanomaterial producer all the way through to the customer.
These projects have been vitally important for understanding the occupational hazards of nanomaterials in material handling scenarios, in the integration of products, and any potential risks to the consumers.
These studies have been long drawn-out processes that involve multiple industry partners, academic institutions, and industry associations, as a long time is needed to obtain comprehensive and conclusive results. Nevertheless, these types of projects have been at the forefront of nanomaterial regulations and have helped to instil confidence in nanomaterials from a safety perspective—as they have been shown to be safe in many instances where people have been worrying.
The second area relates to graphene specifically. The production side of graphene scaled up massively in a short space of time, and many more companies started producing graphene in this time as well. This injection of large quantities of graphene into the marketplace—some of which were not very well tested and attracted criticism for being fake graphene—prompted a rapid regulatory response.
This came in the form of the Graphene REACH consortium, which ensures that any company complies with the necessary safety requirements when producing over 1 tonne per annum of graphene, graphene oxide, or reduced graphene oxide (with differing categories based on how much is produced).
The REACH consortium has only been possible thanks to a number of companies from across both the US and Europe coming together to provide the necessary data for the regulations. The REACH consortium has been very successful thanks to these collaborations and there are now a number of graphene producers that have been recognised as producing large quantities of graphene safely, instilling further confidence in graphene.
Nanomaterials applications over hype
Some people have jumped on the bandwagon overhyping a nanotechnology application and its important to make sure that the regulatory and application processes are fully defined as this market matures we are seeing more of the true benefits of these applications coming to the fore. Some level of hype is good to get people interested, but too much hype leads to unrealistic expectations.
It first started with carbon nanotubes. They were the next best thing to solve all problems. The problem was that people rushed to use them, didn’t understand how to use them properly, didn’t know how to align them properly when using them in their products, and it led to disappointment as the material performance did not live up to expectations.
The same has happened in recent years with graphene. Many people have dubbed it the ‘wonder material’. Yes, it does have excellent properties. Yes, those properties can be used to improve other materials when added to them. But the term ‘wonder material’ sets an unrealistic expectation and marketing groups have to put the application in context for these technologies to be allowed to realise their potential.
We have seen a resurgence in carbon nanotubes in recent years, and there’s now more interest in them again. But that has taken time, and many people now realise that they must be used in certain ways. You can’t just dump them into other materials and expect to obtain the best results.
Graphene is the one that we are currently dealing with, as people are still going along with the hype. But at the same time, more people are now coming to realise that there is a lot to graphene, and it doesn’t have to be used in some big groundbreaking applications, it can be used as a simple additive in many applications to enhance or improve existing solutions.
It’s always good to strike a balance, as the industry wants the investment to come and the interest to be there, but unrealistic expectations shouldn’t be set—as that’s what leads to a potentially useful Nano material being forgotten for its enhancements.
Once again, collaboration within the industry has been key to improving the ability to deliver solutions that work. Many collaborations have started on lower-tech products and worked their way up to more high-tech applications. The collaboration and integration of nanomaterials in lower-tech applications has been a key factor in instilling confidence in the materials and setting a realistic standard for what nanomaterials can do at all levels.
Conclusion
Nanotechnology has had its fair share of challenges en route to commercialisation and end-use adoption, but many of these barriers have been broken down other the years—often through a collaborative approach.
Naturally, there are still some things that could be improved—the costs for some nanomaterials could still be lower without affecting quality and we have to be watchful for marketeers in terms of their messaging—but on the whole, the progress made over the last couple of decades has smashed a lot of barriers and has now opened up nanotechnology to the global public. You only need to look at the commercial adoption of nanotechnology in TVs—OLEDs and QLEDs—to see that commercial adoption is not a barrier anymore.
The industry is going to continue to push forward in the coming years. The more commercial products that are out there on the market (be it lower or high-tech products), the more that other industries will start to adopt nanoscale innovations and disrupt the status quo. We’ve already seen it across many industries, so it’s only a matter of time before others follow suit.
Author:
Liam Critchley
Specialist Freelance Chemistry and Nanotechnology Writer
