Versarien subsidiary reports "major advance" in graphene platelet production

Materials engineering firm Versarien jumped after announcing that its graphene development subsidiary, 2-DTech, has made a "major" advance in graphene platelet production, which it believes will accelerate potential commercial applications for graphene and graphene products.It has developed its own proprietary graphene production technique, a process that offers a number of advantages over the conventional graphene manufacturing solutions that are currently on the market."This process can be automated and allows graphene sheets to be produced in larger quantities and with greater chemical purity," the firm explained."The resulting graphene has up to 99% carbon and minimal oxygen content, as well as being effectively inert. The graphene also exhibits exceptionally good structure and retains a very high degree of crystallinity ensuring that the risk of contamination is significantly reduced."2-DTech expecting to form a number of further partnerships to commercialise this technology in a timely fashion in the near future.Versarien chief Neill Ricketts said the company had taken a "fundamental step forward"."Our technique is highly scalable and we can also use our existing group resources to manufacture relatively large quantities of high quality graphene," he continued."This process is no more complex than existing production techniques thereby providing our customers greater product flexibility."The group is now planning to begin production and expects that by utilising its existing production facilities it will be able to lower its graphene production costs.The share price had climbed 13.1% to 16.40p by 09:13.