About Us
Who we are
Our mission
Our mission
Dickinson Corporation is a private materials lab in the San Francisco Bay Area that has developed a new category of ultralight nanoarchitected materials or "metamaterials" from atomically thin base materials like graphene. Our research is premised upon scaling the extraordinary mechanical, sorptive, and transport capabilities of 2D materials over microscopic or macroscopic 3D spaces.
Our mission
Our mission
Our mission
From the cradle of mineral extraction to the grave of landfilled and unsequestered waste, the footprint of industry and human activity can be framed as mass in, mass out, and mass in transit. At Dickinson, our mission is to pioneer a paradigm shift from bulk-phase legacy materials toward ultralight multifunctional metamaterials that are h
From the cradle of mineral extraction to the grave of landfilled and unsequestered waste, the footprint of industry and human activity can be framed as mass in, mass out, and mass in transit. At Dickinson, our mission is to pioneer a paradigm shift from bulk-phase legacy materials toward ultralight multifunctional metamaterials that are higher-performing, more sustainable, and ultimately less expensive.
Our work
Our mission
Our work
Dickinson's materials research is privately funded. Our activities include basic research, application development, and pilot-scale manufacturing at our R&D facility in northern California. We are actively collaborating with industry-leading partners to incorporate Dickinson's architected graphene particles and architected graphene composites in their products and systems.
Technology
How do you build 3D, macroscopic structures from 2D building blocks?
Drawing inspiration from soot formation, our technique involves growing, aligning, and homopolymerizing 2D, polycyclic "monomers" via edge-to-edge grafting. This directed macromolecular self-assembly evolves a much larger, coalesced polycyclic structure that can be either a simple monolayer or a chiral multilayer network characterized by polycyclic interlayer connectedness, as shown at right. We embed this base material in 3D space by constraining its formation to the surface of a porous templating structure, which is subsequently removed and recycled. As a result of this pathway, the resulting 3D network benefits from polycyclic connectedness over a scale that is coterminous with the templating surface, which may be macroscopically discontinuous (i.e. particulate templates) or continuous based on application requirements. Precise nanoengineering of the templating structure enables us to impart rational, application-informed nanoarchitectures to the 3D network. Our access to topologically and geometrically diverse networks is the basis of a broad morphotaxonomy of nanoarchitected graphenes, which have as their common motif a bicontinuous, nonperiodic smooth-shell structure. These network features have been shown in recent research to promote defect tolerance, isotropic mechanics, and energy absorption.
Using this bottom-up pathway, Dickinson can build large-scale graphenic metamaterials that blur the line between materials and synthetic structures. Unlike graphene aerogels or "3D graphenes," our architected graphenes contain no internal discontinuities to be bridged by binders, and we can obtain diverse, application-targeted properties and property combinations by design.
The bigger picture: a convergence in the evolutions of 2D materials & polymer science
The last forty years of carbon nanotechnology can be viewed as a stalled evolution toward the construction of larger-scale, higher-dimensional structures from graphenic lattices. After the discovery of 0D fullerenes in 1985, researchers introduced 1D nanotubes in 1994 and 2D nanosheets in 2004, but for the last two decades the field has struggled with the final step from 2D to 3D. This step is the most critical if graphene’s properties— currently confined to the negligible volumes of low-dimensional particle types—are to be extended to larger, more practically useful volumes. Attempts to construct 3D networks from commercially available particle types like nanotubes and nanosheets have produced disjoint assemblies with inadequate density, structural order, and polycyclic connectedness.
Dickinson's architected graphenes embody the final stage of graphene’s progression from 0D to 3D structures. With their carbon backbone, multiscale crosslinking, and diverse mechanics, they also represent a natural evolution of polymers. However, while polymers are defined by a base structure of discrete, 1D chains, architected graphenes are defined by a continuous, 2D base structure. From a structure-property standpoint, this augments their performance envelope and exploits graphene's inherent multifunctionality. In many applications, architected graphenes' combination of foamlike density and unprecedented mechanics will eventually enable them to replace polymers, either partially (via their inclusion as weight-reducing fillers, or discontinuous phases) or completely (as a continuous phases). At Dickinson, we believe that 2D materials science and polymer science are converging to the great benefit of both.
Partnerships
Let's Collaborate!
Dickinson is collaborating with several industry-leading manufacturers to bring the benefits of architected graphene additives and films to their polymer products. We work closely with partners to design application-tailored architected graphenes that meet their criteria for value and performance and that are highly differentiated from their other alternatives.
Additionally, Dickinson is fostering collaborative relationships with university and government research groups to increase awareness of our materials in peer-reviewed journals. In particular, our team is interested in collaborating with experts in computational mechanics and multiscale modeling to build the structure-property map of architected graphenes and associated composite materials.
