Dr. Kim Ho-seop's team at the Korea Electric Research Institute develops room-temperature multilayer graphene coating technology... Applied for 4 domestic and international patents

The Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute announced on the 27th that it has developed a technology to coat 'multilayer graphene' at room temperature using thin film manufacturing technology widely used in industrial fields.

Dr. Kim Ho-seop's research team at the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute's Power Cable Research Center collaborated with Professor Kim Jun-ho's team at Incheon National University and Professor Lee Se-hee's team at Kyungpook National University to secure technology to mass-produce ultra-high-performance composite conductors using existing thin film manufacturing technology.

Recently, as the number of electric vehicles and artificial intelligence (AI) data centers has increased, new materials have become necessary to reduce power loss and heat generation even with conductors of the same size.

Graphene, a thin new material in which carbon atoms are arranged in a honeycomb shape, can become a perfect next-generation conductor when combined with copper.

However, it was not easy to apply it to industrial sites because it required a difficult process to transfer high-quality graphene onto another material.

Dr. Ho-seop Kim's research team found the cause that interferes with the formation of the graphene structure, and then used the existing thin film manufacturing technology (sputtering), which separates the material into very small particles and stacks them on a substrate, and succeeded in creating carbon thin films immediately at room temperature, from one or two layers of very thin graphene to several layers of graphite, like assembling Lego blocks.

The Korea Electrical Research Institute emphasized that this is the first time in the world that a carbon thin film in such an ordered form has been created directly using the existing sputtering method.

He also explained that by using this technology, metals such as copper and graphene can be alternately stacked as desired without complicated separate processes, making it possible to mass-produce ultra-high-performance composite conductors in the future.

The achievements made by Dr. Ho-seop Kim's research team were published in 'Surface & Coatings Technology', an international top-tier (Q1) academic journal in the field of material surface and coating technology, and led to three domestic patent applications and one foreign patent application.