Garmor/UCF Nanoscience Technology Center

An Orlando startup company is using a technique developed by University of Central Florida researchers to produce commercial volumes of a material that could make everything from airplanes to bridges stronger and lighter. The novel one-atom thick product called graphene has been studied for years but until now has been prohibitively expensive to produce in large quantities. Richard Blair, a chemist in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, and Ph.D. graduate student David Restrepo, perfected chemical and mechanical processes to generate graphene at a fraction of previous costs. UCF licensed the technique to Garmor, which is gearing up to make graphene at the rate of a ton or more per year for sale to product manufacturers. “Using graphene as an additive for plastics and metals enables stronger, lightweight composite materials with potentially endless applications,” says Anastasia Canavan, Garmor CEO.