Graphene Coating for the DIY'er

[JohnG]

I have been interested in Graphene for some time, definitely since I learnt of it as a material that could enhance Audio.
The knowledge of its use in cables production was only recently made known to me, which triggered my curiosity.
I have done a little Google aided research, to gather how it was being utilised, and if it was improving conductivity in metals, as I have always held onto the knowledge it is a very good conductor.

As a result, I have found 'White Papers' explaining the outcomes of experiments that confirm it is a substance that improves conductivity, it would appear only slightly, but as a Global usage, these improvements are substantial. The word 'Slightly' is my very layman term as a interpretation of the conclusion within the White Paper.
The White Papers are supported by equations that I dare not pretend to understand.

With me being the 'eternal optimist' two thoughts evolved,
Thought One, :scratch::scratch:, maybe that report of this 'slight improvement' could mean exactly that when put into a Audio Context,
maybe it allows for a change in a presentation, that is perceived as improvement in the SQ.

Thought Two, :mental::mental:, is it possible to produce a,
'DIY Copper - Graphene Coated Cable, well the answer at present, but not fully understood,
seems to be 'YES'.
Disclaimer !!, I am viewing Google supplied information, and how accurate it is, will need to be confirmed.
What I have seen so far is a operation that is quite appealing, this is where a Sheathed Cable has had a retro applied nano coating of Graphene.

On deconstruction of the cable, when the wire is observed removed from the sheathing it is evident that the nano coating has migrated onto the whole of the wire surface.
Another additional benefit witnessed, is that the nano coating of approximately,
a 2 nm thickness, is also a fully functioning insulator, removing the need for a sheathing.
In the same footage the Graphene nano coating was also shown applied to a variety of metals in wire form.

I would like to think that this is a DIY pursuit worth pursuing to prove the feasibility of the processes required.

I am now 'off on one' working out how to Graphene nano coat, RCA Connectors, Valve Pins and Bases, IC Pins and Sockets.
"Calm Down Terry, Calm Down" :lol:

[Jazid]

Interesting that is acting simultaneously as a conductor and an insulator [emoji2957]
Summat amiss here, but carry on and enjoy the journey [emoji4]

Sent from my BLA-L09 using Tapatalk

[JohnG]

The Link refers to a easy method to apply a Graphene Coating.
I like the term 'easy', if this relates to having access to a Laboratory and the facilities,
or whether it is a 'Blue Peter Project' or 'Instructables' will have to be determined.


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321384953_Graphene_Coating_on_Copper_by_Electropho retic_Deposition_for_Corrosion_Prevention

[YNWaN]

Graphene is a product that has long been promised but has yet to be produced in any meaningful amounts. However, because of the ‘buzz’ surrounding this material, many manufacturers now claim to use it. In essence, graphene is just very fine graphite powder, but just adding graphite powder to oil doesn’t make that oil a superconductor, or anything of the sort - it just makes it into oil with a bit of inert powder in it. By the same token, adding it to the plastic in an injection moulded speaker cone doesn’t imbue that cone with super strength. In all cases I have encountered, in audio at least, the term ‘graphene’ could just as easily be replaced with ‘talc’, a much more commonly used inert filler.

[mikeyb]

You get it in golf balls, Callaway use it.

[karma67]

ok so hands up who now is shaking talc over their cable??? :lol:

[Bigman80]

ok so hands up who now is shaking talc over their cable??? [emoji38][emoji23][emoji23]

[mikeyb]

ok so hands up who now is shaking talc over their cable??? [emoji38]Doesn't everyone?

[emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]

[JohnG]

I only Talc my Cables when they have been removed from the Bath and Towel Dried.

Joking aside, it looks like Graphene is here to stay, the science is backing it and showing it has a purpose.
There are uses proposed for it, beyond the gimmicky ones.
What matters in such cases, is whether the production of materials and impact of those materials in use, is seen to be a satisfactory offset against the common alternatives.
These calculations are usually presented as a benefit to be had from a Global usage.
If a offset is that certain niche products can benefit from a rare material that has become a common produced material, then the better for all.

[YNWaN]

You get it in golf balls, Callaway use it.

Indeed, it’s use is largely a marketing gimmick and, as we all know, the world of audio does love it’s marketing gimmicks.

[Mr. C]

ok so hands up who now is shaking talc over their cable??? :lol:

Now have you been indulging in commercial espionage Jamie, I'll have you know I have fully certified audiophile talc shaker with made in Salisbury embossed on the front:stalks:

[bumpy]

Indeed, it’s use is largely a marketing gimmick and, as we all know, the world of audio does love it’s marketing gimmicks.

Digital ready :)

[YNWaN]

And not forgetting ‘perfect sound forever’ ;).

[Barry]

As well as:

Cable risers
Vinyl de-magnetisers
Grounding boxes
Cartridge storage 'pyramids'
De-ionised safety pins and perforated strips of paper to balance the energy fields in the listening room
.
.
.
.
.
.
:rolleyes:

[YNWaN]

Did you make up the ‘cartridge storage pyramids’? Unfortunately I know all the others are real ;).

[Barry]

Did you make up the ‘cartridge storage pyramids’? Unfortunately I know all the others are real ;).

No - it was as a Hi-Fi News Audio Accessory. A miniature pyramid having the same ratio and proportions as that of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza. Made from card, when placed over any small item that item would wear less and last longer. Thus razor blades would remain sharper, small batteries last longer, and stylii last longer.

It was of course an April Fool joke by the magazine.

[YNWaN]

No doubt soon to be reintroduced by Machina Dynamica - but with added graphine.

[JohnG]

Interesting that a material that is derived from the exact same element being Carbon when produced as one of its allotropes, be it Diamond or Carbon Fibre, or Graphene, the yet to be true value of the Graphene used in the realms of HiFi are being met with Skepticism.

I am not beating the drum for Graphene, as I would a Diamond Tip on a Stylus, or the merits of Carbon Fibre as Structural Material with exceptional Mechanical Properties.
What I will say is it appears to me as a layman, to have all the qualities to obsolete the use of Diamond and Carbon Fibre and Ceramic in the areas of Mechanical Engineering.

The referred to materials are all man made today.
Diamond as we know it, when used as a Stylus Tip, are more than likely are being man made in a Laboratory.
Carbon Fibre is man made and when used as a part of a composite material, there is no challenge to its proven values when used in a environment such as Engineering and that extends into usage for HiFi Purposes.
Ceramic is the other, and if it is not used in certain applications, the application will be seen to be needing a upgrade to the use of Ceramic, i.e Bearings.

Graphene is believed to be the strongest material discovered to date.
It is being sintered to produce metallic products, i.e impregnated wire, as well as the coated wire under discussion that started this thread.
It is being grown into fibres, that will outperform Carbon Fibre, if the additional strength offered from Graphene is seen as a value.
It is also being produced in Spheres and other Shapes, so a Stylus Tip or Bearing is a believable item to be seen in the future.
I can imagine that it may one day, become the new Tip for the Stylus, giving a 4000 hour life and due to its uniqueness extract more from a groove than any predecessor material??
It may as a result, be necessary to have a Cartridge Suspension Serviced before the tip wears out ??
As far as I can see, as a material, it is on its way to becoming a Household Name, the same as Carbon Fibre, Kevlar Fibre, Boron Fibre, and dare I say it Hemp Fibre.

As said, there is a risk of the Gimmick putting it out as the next best thing, that results in it being seen as sales motivator and contributing nothing else.
What I would like to see happen is that it gets it chance to present itself as the next valued material, proves its contribution and offers a extension of choice in the realms of HiFi.

[YNWaN]

I think you misunderstand my skepticism. It is the specific application of graphene, or more the specific way the graphene is being applied, that is where my criticism lies. If one reads the link supplied earlier (not by me) it discusses the application of graphene to connectors to reduce oxidisation (interestingly, not to increase conductivity) and the preferred method is by deposition in a vacuum. The gimmick bit comes where sellers supply bottles of liquid with graphene powder suspended in it and sell it as a viable way of improving conductivity.

For what it’s worth the use of diamond, carbon fibre and ceramic have all been misrepresented by various audio companies. It’s not that these materials do not offer real performance advantages but more about the technology required to realise them.
——
One of the recent examples of this theory/technology schism has been in the development of beryllium drivers. Now beryllium domes have been around for some time but have remained rare as their manufacture required huge investment in vapour deposition equipment (as done by Yamaha and now TAD). Traditionally metal domes are pressed and this is an accurate, quick and cheap method. Unfortunately this has not been possible for beryllium as it’s not sufficiently ductile. The simple answer has been to alloy beryllium with more ductile metals to increase its ductility to the point it can be press formed. Now we come to the key point and that is that whilst the alloying with other metals makes it more ductile it also makes the finished dome significantly less stiff and no longer has the same properties as the vapour deposited, pure beryllium, driver.

[JohnG]

The Link is to the work I had read on conductivity, most of the recorded material contained,
I do not make sense of, but I liked the conclusion.
The other link posted was relating to another query put forward, and as said, did not cover conductivity.
As the thread is about the possible benefits of a improved conductivity in a wire coated in Graphene, the link should help with seeing there is a improved conductivity that can be measured.


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283111870_Conductive_Enhancement_of_CopperGraphene _Composites_Based_on_a_High-quality_Graphene

[Bksabath]

Copy and paste from wikypedia

Electron transport[edit (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Graphene&action=edit&section=10)]Graphene displays remarkable electron mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_mobility) at room temperature, with reported values in excess of 15000 cm2⋅V−1⋅s−1.[37] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-FOOTNOTEGeimNovoselov2007-37) Hole and electron mobilities were expected to be nearly identical.[78] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-E-Phonon-78) The mobility is nearly independent of temperature between 10 K and 100 K,[28] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-2dgasDiracFermions-28)[83] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-GiantMobility-83)[84] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-E-ph-84) which implies that the dominant scattering mechanism is defect scattering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_scattering). Scattering by graphene's acoustic phonons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon) intrinsically limits room temperature mobility to 200000 cm2⋅V−1⋅s−1 at a carrier density of 1012 cm−2,[84] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-E-ph-84)[85] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-GrapheneMC-85) 10×106 times greater than copper.[86] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-arx1406-86)
The corresponding resistivity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistivity) of graphene sheets would be 10−6 Ω⋅cm. This is less than the resistivity of silver (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver), the lowest otherwise known at room temperature.[87] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-UMDnews-87) However, on SiO

2 substrates, scattering of electrons by optical phonons of the substrate is a larger effect than scattering by graphene's own phonons. This limits mobility to 40000 cm2⋅V−1⋅s−1.[84] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#cite_note-E-ph-84)



Bit I understand is 10 X 10 at the six so a 10 whit 6 zeroes after greater than copper
and 10-6 less than the resistivity of Silver

But it is a single layer mono atomic element How one work whit it?

I don':doh:t have a hammer small enough

[Barry]

The resistivity of annealed copper at room temperature is 1.72 10-6 Ohm.cm. For silver, it is 1.69 10-6 Ohm.cm.

I find it hard to believe that coating a copper wire with a monoatomic layer of carbon would improve the conductivity, but I am open to persuasion.

[YNWaN]

I will now leave this ‘discussion’, but rather than repeating myself I will quote from the last linked article:


However, there are still challenges to face for grapheneapplications in metal composites, due to reasons including anagglomeration tendency in liquids, and poor wettabilitybetween graphene and metal, which cause difficulties in thepreparation of high performance metal/graphene composites.Therefore, up to now, there are few works on metal/graphenecomposites and complex preparation methods with low costs.Electrochemical deposition22and laser physical vapordeposition23have been proven capable of realizing uniformdispersion of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) in a metal matrixfor preparation of metal/graphene composite lms. Z. Li et al.24successfully prepared aluminum/RGO composites and foundthat a composite reinforced with only 0.3 wt% of RGO showedan 18 and 17% increase in the elastic modulus and hardness,respectively. They rstly achieved uniform distribution of RGOin an Al matrix via simple electrostatic interaction betweengraphene oxide (GO) and Al akes, and a densied RGO/Alcomposite was obtained by hot pressing the RGO/Alcomposite powders.

[alfaati]

There is a guy in Hungary with a cable brand run by himself, called Valhalla. This is a 'one man' cable manufacture. His latest experiment is the Graphene-X speaker cable.
I never met him, however we are talking through emails and forum messages for years now. He has the same sound ideal like I do, and he is obsessed by exotic materials just like me. So, we have something in common. He started to design cables about 5-6 years ago if I remember right. He is using only the purest and most exotic materials and high quality connectors. Palladium, Platinum, Gold, Silver commonly used in his cables. His cables became kind of famous within certain people and as far as I know he has been invited with his cables to some famous hi-fi audio manufacturers to show off and demonstrate them. Last company that invited him, was Kaiser-Acoustic Germany. Personally I have not heard his cables never ever. But one thing is sure, people are trading with him very expensive branded cables to get one which was made by him. He never stops developing and the Graphene-X is just a further proof of that. Magico speaker company started recently using the graphene in its drivers now, so I wasn't really surprised when i have seen Valhalla started to prototyping graphene based cables.

This "exotic material thing" especially newer materials like graphene which we have so little knowledge about, could be easily controversial topic with lots of argument sometimes. Therefore my post is only an informational reply and not a personal statement about these materials.

I will link Valhalla's personal thread where hi makes announcements, introducing cables, posting trading ads and new developments appears. The Graphene-X prototype can be seen under the post that has been posted at 23. September 2019, 13:41 C.E.T.

https://avx.hu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=149&t=12706&start=25