Double Graphene Lightweight Puffer

While it’s invisible to the human eye and only a single atom thick, graphene is the lightest, strongest, most conductive material ever discovered. The existence of graphene as a supermaterial was first theorised in the 1940s, but it wasn’t until 2004 that two maverick scientists at the University of Manchester – Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov – were able to isolate and test it. They peeled layer after layer off a shaving of graphite using Scotch tape until they produced a sample of graphene just one atom thick. In 2010 their work won them the Nobel Prize. And thanks to their pioneering work we’ve been creating our own world firsts with graphene since 2018.

The Double Graphene Lightweight Puffer is the world’s first puffer jacket engineered with a graphene shell and graphene insulation. Lightweight, water repellent, windproof and breathable, it’s an astonishingly versatile puffer that can store and redistribute heat, and reduce humidity next to your body. And because graphene conducts heat better than any material on Earth, it helps regulate your temperature wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

While the scientists who first isolated graphene used Scotch tape to extract it from a shaving of graphite pencil lead, we don’t. We create tiny stacks of graphene mechanically, using zero chemicals or solvents, before blending them with polyurethane to create an ultra-thin graphene membrane that sits at the very centre of the jacket’s outer shell.

The membrane prevents water from penetrating the material from the outside while letting sweat vapour escape from the inside, making the puffer water repellent and breathable at the same time. We also apply a hydrophobic treatment to the outside of the puffer which uses electrostatic forces to make water bead and roll off the surface.

You can heat the puffer up by leaving it out in the sun or over a radiator, and the graphene will simply store the heat and spread it around your body when you put the puffer on. The effect can be visibly demonstrated by placing your hand on the fabric, taking it away and then shooting the jacket with a thermal imaging camera. The heat of the hand print stays long after the hand has left.

It’s not just the outside of the puffer that’s built with graphene, we also infuse the insulation with graphene too thanks to the work of physicists at the Max Planck Institute. In 2014 they revealed that graphene challenges the fundamental laws of heat conduction. While the amount of heat a material can conduct was believed to stay constant whatever size or shape it was, the conductivity of graphene increases the more graphene there is, which means that it can theoretically absorb an unlimited amount of heat.

Graphene is bacteriostatic, which means bacteria can’t grow or reproduce on its surface. As it’s the build-up of the bacteria in sweat that makes your clothes smell, the puffer will stay fresh far longer than a normal puffer as the bacteria can’t multiply on its surface. As well as being bacteriostatic, the graphene membrane is also hypoallergenic and anti-static.

When graphite is reduced to a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagon formation, it turns into a supermaterial unlike anything ever known before – it’s so strong and so stretchy that the fibres of a big enough spider web coated in graphene could catch a falling plane. With the potential to transform almost every industry from space travel to electronics, graphene is so mind-blowing that its discovery was described as like finding CERN’s Large Hadron Collider on your desk.