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 nanoarchitected metamaterials called "polymeric graphenes" constructed from 2D carbon building blocks.
Our mission
Our mission
Our mission
Dickinson's mission is to hasten a worldwide paradigm shift away from legacy materials toward a more sustainable age of inexpensive, lightweight materials that meaningfully reduce the footprint of industry and human activity.
Our work
Our mission
Our work
Dickinson's activities span basic research, product development, and pilot-scale materials production. We are actively collaborating with industry-leading partners to incorporate our polymeric graphenes in their products.
Technology
How do you build 3D, macroscopic structures from 2D building blocks?
Dickinson has developed a patented technology for directing the polymerization of 2D “monomers” in 3D space, resulting in a new category of large-scale, 2D-structured 3D networks that can be described as "polymeric graphenes" due to their crosslinking and breadth of engineerable material properties, which can range from elastic to rigid. Dickinson's proprietary technique involves concurrently growing and grafting 2D free radical condensates. Analogous to 0D monomers homopolymerizing to form 1D polymer chains, the 2D condensates homopolymerize and coalesce into a 3D network having a polyhelicoidal geometry. This homopolymer is characterized by a chiral interlayer bonding motif present in naturally crosslinked carbons such as anthracite and soot.
Ranging in height from a single layer to tens of layers, and laterally scalable to arbitrarily large dimensions, the polyhelicoidal network is grown over a complex, engineered templating surface, and it replicates this surface's geometry and topology. Removal of the templating structure leaves behind a labyrinthine microscopic or macroscopic framework consisting of a single wall, the wall in turn consisting of a single polyhelicoidal network, the network in turn consisting of a single graphenic lattice. Using this bottom-up pathway, Dickinson can build large-scale metamaterials with ultrafine architectures that blur the line between materials and synthetic structures. Unlike graphene aerogels or "3D graphenes," our polymeric graphenes contain no internal discontinuities to be bridged by binders, and we rationally architect them in order to obtain application-targeted material properties.
The bigger picture: a convergence in the evolutions of 2D materials & polymers
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 periodicity, and lattice continuity.
Dickinson's polymeric graphenes embody the final stage of graphene’s progression from 0D to architected 3D structures. These networks are many orders of magnitude larger than their nanoscale predecessors. From a structure-property standpoint, polymeric graphene microparticles are also fundamentally better-suited than their predecessors for additive applications, where their three-dimensional particle geometry and internalization of surface area eliminate the challenges (e.g., limited dispersibility, viscosity effects, toxicity concerns, etc.) that arise from the low-dimensionality of nanotubes and nanosheets. Based on this, the imminent commercial readiness of polymeric graphenes invites a critical reassessment of carbon nanoparticles’ future roles as additives.
Partnerships
Let's Collaborate!
Dickinson is collaborating with several industry-leading manufacturers to bring the benefits of polymeric graphene additives and films to their polymer products. We work closely with partners to design application-tailored polymeric 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 polymeric graphenes and associated composite materials.
