There are many 2D materials being created nowadays and many of them have properties superior to graphene. Where hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) differs vastly from graphene, is that is in an electrical insulator (although the band gap can be easily tuned), thus lending itself towards coating, dielectric and field effect transistor (FET) applications. The reason you don’t hear much about h-BN and other 2D materials is because they have been hard to manufacture at large scales.
Grolltex, a US-based 2D materials company, have expanded out into large-scale manufacturing of h-BN, which is one of the more stable and promising 2D materials. The new facility is considered to be the largest commercial manufacturing facility for h-BN in North America.
Jeff Draa, the CEO of Grolltex, summed up what the new advancements mean for the company and the scientific community- “Our existing customer base has been asking when h-BN would become available and we’re thrilled to be selling it now to research and design labs all over the world. The graphene community is very excited about the potential of h-BN and we believe we’re the first to offer it for sale. Production requirements for h-BN are quite similar to those of mono layer graphene so we can really leverage our core strengths in production and transfer”
While the exact production capabilities have not been released, the company has stated that it can produce h-BN as a standalone material, inter-layered with graphene or deposited onto a substrate of choice as per the customers’ requirements. It will be interesting to see whether the commercial applications of using h-BN expand now that there are greater production capabilities.
Source: Grolltex
