TidalP

The patent reference is cetainly an interesting read as a technical/scientific piece of work. But, with all due respects I would offer the following comments. No offence intended.

1. Scientific comments: This patent application was leaning toward the vein-vein combination right from the start. Perhaps, they were successful in producing SWCNT with the vein-vein combination, but the experients were not carried out on the same footing. One glaring item is the carbon content used in the flake experient. It was much lower than that used in the vein experiment (93.8% versus 98.5%). Also, details were not available on the condition of the flake graphite used in the experiement, e.g. used as is, or was it prepared sufficiently to bring it to the "battery quality"? From what we know, flake graphite could be processed to achieve 99+% Cg. So from a superficial disclosure from this article, it wold be premature to draw any firm conclusions with respect to the superiority of vein over flake in making SWCNT. It would be more advantageous if the patent application just refer to "the use of vein-vein to make SWCNT" rather than dragging the flake and the other one in the application, since this would invite questions from the folks from the patent office (they have smart cookies in there).

2. What would be the cost to produce 1g of SWCNT?

3. Selling price of $500/g (in 2010, but cheaper now?) is astronomical. Not too many applications can afford this kind of price. In order to make money in this business, supplier would need to produce in large volume, hopefully the price would drop at high volume.

$500/g = $500,000/kg = 0.5M/kg = $0.5B/tonne (is my math OK?) = mind boggling. Even if the price were reduced by a factor of 1000 the cost would still be = $0.5M/tonne, still mind boggling (even $0.25M/tonne, assuming 50% production cost, is still mind boggling).

We are still talking about $8500/tonne as a good price of ZEN graphite.If we could get $20,000/tonne it woud be excellent (some, quite a few, of us could head to the Caymans). I would not advocate going beyond this level, e.g. towards $40,000/tonne. We would need to be a bit reallistic.

4. Graphene and nano-technology are at least 10 years down the line. My target for ZEN is ~1 year for a TO (2 years at most). Ten years+ horizon is just too far away. Master Po would not try to persuate me with "Patience young grasshopper" in this case.

goldhunter