Zig Shen applied UC's graphene powders to develop graphene doped nylon fiber for enhancing the thermal comfort
Why Zig Shen introduced UC’s graphene - GreenPhene™ ?
With the evolution on the development of material technology, brand companies give their ideas to innovate more creative textile products for consumers. But, due to some manufactures may use some harmful substance intentionally or unintentionally, the consumers will buy the unsafe textile products unknowingly and may cause health and safety problems to themselves. In the meantime, those harmful substances also will be released and cause unrecovered damages to environment no matter while they have been used or recycled. Therefore, most of countries and brands built and follow the strict inspections to make sure the safety and consistency of the substances that they use in the supply chain, and also to achieve the goal on the protection both on consumer health and environment.
We know graphene is a nanomaterial with excellent thermal properties, not only for the highest thermal conductivity of 5300 W/m‧k among all materials but also for more than 0.93 of thermal radiation emissivity, that makes it a wonderful material for heat dissipation with the synergy of conduction and radiation effects. However, there are many kinds of commercial products of graphene produced by different methods, and their properties and purity usually refer to their original process. In fact, the common process such as acid oxidation or solvent based liquid-exfoliation will not only have the safety concerns to human beings by using a lot of chemicals and toxic solvents during the process, the released wasted water also causes the irreparable pollution to environment.
To solve this critical issue, UC Bacon develope a complete dry process, called direct continuous phsical technology, to produce the graphene by using a highly purified graphite (electronic grade) as the raw materials. No acid, alkali solution, organic solvent or harmful chemical will be used in the process. The inspection report of heavy metal residue from SGS (Test standard: EN71-3:1994+A1:2000/AC:2002) proved non detection for the common eight heavy metal residue in UC Bacon's graphene powders, and this results are fullfill the highest standard for the raw material in textile industry. That means that it is a positive attitude to protect our family and environment by using UC’s high quality graphene while we experience the magic from the graphene technology.
What is the advantage from graphene yarns to textile?
Graphene yarns usually is made by a fiber spinning process with graphene masterbatch, which is a blend of graphene and fiber materials. In general, the graphene content inside fiber will be limited by the particle size of graphene, and the typical content are at the range of 0.1 to 0.5 wt%. Unlike the effect from one-sided heat transfer generated by graphene printing or lamination of graphene membrane, graphene yarns could generate a totally different heat transfer behavior by texture design through weaving, and further enhance the heat transmission along with the graphene yarns.
Zig Shen developed the graphene nylon yarns using UC’s high quality graphene, and further developed graphene woven/knitting fabric with different texture. Using the thermal dissipation module followed by ASTM D1518 under the practical environment, we found that graphene yarns contained fabric could prolong the cooling time up to 20 mins compared to the blank sample under a specific texture design, and the reduction of 0.18 on clo value also represent an temperature decrease of 1℃ after 30mins. It means the graphene yarns would enhance the heat conduction of the graphene contained fabric and transfer the heat from the body to environment continuously and achieve the goal for the long-last cooling.