 Hi Claudio, it's very good to have you, welcome to our conference. So Claudio is a business development manager for Applied Graphene Materials and they are the first European company, first European graphene company to have floated on the A market. So what's so unique about your graphene products? What is unique about our graphene boils down to the way we make it. You know you can have two flavors of graphene, you can have graphene in films and graphene in powders. We belong to the category of powders. Now if you look how you can make powders, you mostly make graphene powder also called technically nano-plateless by taking graphite which is a stucco layer of graphene and separating those individual layers out. So you explode, you exfoliate the graphite to get graphene. Well, our company took a completely different approach from the very beginning. We didn't want to build in this dependence on the supply of graphite and we chose a synthetic approach. We have a proprietary method which we call a bottom-up method. We basically start from the carbon atom, a source of carbon atom and we use that to assemble graphene from scratch. In our case it's an ethanol solution that's used as a precursor material to provide the carbon atoms that date on the certain condition of temperature, pressure and so on. In our reactor are assembled through a self-assembly process into graphene nano-plateless. These are then collated at the other end of the reactor. And the beauty of that is that not only the process does not rely on graphite, it's a continuous flow process. What it means is that as long as the tub that injects the precursor material is open, you will get graphene at the other end. So it's intrinsically a known batch process which lends itself quite nicely to the scaling up. And that's what we've been doing in the first, let me count now, it's almost three years we are around in the first three years of life. And we continue to do that because we want also to be prepared for a growth of the market. So we have gone from a few grams a week to a few grams a day to tens of grams a day now to a point where we had a machine capable of making a tunnel here and now we are looking beyond that because we are mostly looking at volume applications where graphene will basically be used as a multifunctional additive to add a range of property to also material. And from the beginning for this reason we focus on sectors such as composites, paints and coatings or lubricants and functional fluids. So application where you can see a small fraction of graphene being dispersed in a larger matrix bringing the properties are typical of the uniform continuous graphene field just by using these fragments of graphene as a carry of those properties. Well thanks for that Claudio and you know you've been working on the ground in the graphene industry so what is the feel in the industry in general around the world? I think you know it's interesting I've been involved with quite a few cycles of hypes in the past so technology is that all of a sudden caught attention on the large public or the entire industry sector and went through one, two years of reeling, heightened attention and activity around and then at some point that fades out. What I'm seeing with graphene is that if that has to happen it certainly will be a much longer cycle because now it's here on here that I see systematically growth on interest. If anything what we see is that the customer we talk to they are more and more knowledgeable about the field which tells me that they are investing energy resources into doing their homeworks and to building internal expertise so they come into us with more and more know-how more and more specific ideas as to what they want to do with graphene and also there's a lot of opportunity being opened that were not clear in the beginning and this general interest for graphene I think is kind of opening new doors for graphene application and I think we're still fully in this growth phase for the opportunities and in any innovation cycle you see a divergence and a convergent phase I think we're still fully in this divergent phase but by the day more opportunities are spotted than ruled out and it's a good situation to be. Very good and for the good or for the bad there are a lot of comparisons being made between carbon nanotubes and graphene so what is your stand on that how do you see it? Yes that's a very good question because it's not surprising a lot of potential customers do start the conversation with us exactly from this very statement oh we are dealt a lot with carbon nanotube how is this different? Well I'll tell you to begin with carbon nanotube always had a fundamental problem the dispersion of the carbon nanotubes if you try and disperse them to make use of their property you'll see that first you struggle to debundle them because they tend to come in bundles and then once you debundle them and disperse them uniformly they will tend to re-aggregate at some point so the dispersibility there is such a word the ability to disperse the material into an awesome matrix and have it there to convey the property you're after was really a showstopper for a lot of the carbon nanotube application I'm very glad to say that certainly for our graphene dispersibility is not an issue we can take a few examples of things we can take our graphene in pretty much any polymer matrix in any solvent in aqueous solution in lubricants base oils and so on with some effort but certainly in a way that makes it totally doable at scale and a small quantity for R and D lambs so first of all we see the first advantage not having this hurdle of using the material putting it into the place where you want to deploy it in terms of property we do expect to see a bit more of the same if we can say it that way what I mean by that we do expect to see a bit more electrical conductivity a bit more thermal conductivity but in particular a bit more mechanical properties if you think of the morphology of graphene it does offer a larger surface for interaction with the matrix of the polymer hence you would expect that whatever the properties you're trying to impart to the polymer they will be facilitated by the stronger interaction by the larger interaction between polymer matrix and the material itself and actually the way I see it is that you can use it contrary to the carbon nanotube it's not so difficult to make use of it it creates a stable workable dispersion suitable for industrial application and it should bring a few more announcements to the property that have been seen with carbon nanotubes Excellent so as one last question I'm going to ask you a very very general question This fast forward five years? Where is the industry going to be and where are you going to be? Very good question I suspect like in many industries you always see a plethora of company starting off the blocks in the beginning and ten years down the line you may see a few growing significant market share with some degree of specialization but you won't see 20, 30, 40, 50 companies necessarily being established and penetrated significant portion of the market so I expect in other words a degree of consolidation to happen which is a sign of mature industry I would expect the graphene supplier to be integral part of value chain of the chemical industry being coating spades of the polymer industry all the way to the end user of this automotive and aerospace and I actually would expect a lot to be happening in the electronics sector and not just the fancy electronic components side of it but you know the heat management, the reinforcement of the cases all the things that go with an electronic product which is a highly integrated system in the end there are plenty of opportunities there for graphene Yes, here we have a little bit of an example of different ways in which we support our customers although we are in the business of manufacturing and selling graphene we need to make graphene available as quickly as possible in a format that can test so you see a carbon fiber-enforced resin where the resin is doped with graphene why you may want graphene in a carbon fiber enforcement, this radar enforcement it will still help at least in the direction of the carbon fiber to avoid some of the brittleness and some of the weaknesses if you can call it that way, a carbon fiber-enforced material where the fiber is not working for you you have material in the resin here for instance and this is to allow people to compound other material and this is basically a heavily loaded carrier for master batching and for compounding you can see here an example of epoxy resin which can be used for tensile tests this is a way which you create a pool test and you see how much more energy it takes much more force it takes to break that piece of material because it introduced your graphene but we can also create solid material like this it's a compressed graphene so Calu do you make these intermediaries yourself? yes, we have a few more here these are examples of marine primers containing graphene this is the normal material, the one with graphene so yes, all we want to do is to help potential customer accelerate the test and development process that makes a lot of sense so we are not in competition with them in developing applications because it's not in our interest to compete with our customer but anything we can do to accelerate their test and validation will do it and now we are building a bit of experience so we start seeing recurring requests which makes the whole cycle also faster on our side otherwise very happy to learn whatever is needed very good brother, thank you very much Calu pleasure to be here pleasure to have you pleasure to meet you thank you very much