Nano ‘miracle material’ reduces fuel use

GRAPHENE Manufacturing Group (GMG), a Brisbane-based, Canadian-listed nanomaterial producer, has applied the extraordinary properties of graphene to the internal combustion engine (ICE) after discovering its fuel-saving potential.

While graphene is widely referred to as a ‘miracle material’, with its other-worldly qualities making it suited to futuristic electronics and advanced energy storage, trial and error led the GMG team to an unusual discovery – the material drastically reduces fuel use when mixed with engine oil.

“We saw amazing things with graphene in engine oil, so we trialled it on our own cars for years and years,” GMG founder and chief executive, Craig Nicols said.

“We were trying to work out why, and we thought this and we thought that, but we had to work out how and why with proper testing.”

The team’s theory was then verified in a laboratory environment, with GMG running tests on a variety of stationary engines at its manufacturing plant to get to the bottom of how and why graphene reduces fuel use.

“When you do a standard test, you actually don’t see it, which made it tricky,” Mr Nicols said.

“You have to put it under high load, because it actually reacts as you have more load. As the engine generates more torque, it also generates more heat, which normally reduces oil viscosity, but the graphene takes that heat out and maintains viscosity.”

Alongside the thermal conductive benefits of graphene, the additive is also believed to offer a ‘healing effect’ on wear scarring, depositing into damaged metal interface pits to smooth surfaces and reduce friction.

“When you put it into a normal engine, like a car engine, it’s 0.5 grams of graphene but it has a big effect because it's so small.”

Data shared with GoAuto outlined results achieved when testing the G Lubricant in a Caterpillar diesel engine, which amounted to a 10 per cent energy efficiency improvement compared with regular engine oil.

The tests saw the engine run at 80 per cent load for extended periods of time, using a variety of fuel sensors and energy analysers to calculate average fuel use.

Similar tests were carried out on two identical new Cummins stationary diesel engines for a full year, allowing GMG to run concurrent tests that ensured weather and other factors were identical across engines.

GMG then tested the G Lubricant in its high mileage Mercedes-Benz Vito, which saw the 360,000km-old van dyno tested to simulate highway driving – running at 100km/h and 2,500rpm while producing 400Nm.

The results exceeded those achieved with stationary diesel engines, leading to a 13 per cent reduction in fuel use and 27 per cent reduction in NOx emissions.

“We worked out with the testing that for every dollar someone spends on our product, they save around $10 in fuel,” Mr Nicol said, when asked about the cost of the graphene additive.

The implications, while significant for the average vehicle owner, are best realised in fleet applications where higher loads are placed on vehicles.

“It’s the large trucks, diesel generators, farm equipment where you really see it,” Mr Nicol said.

“It’s at four per cent (fuel saving) at 40 per cent load, but it builds, so at 60 per cent load it's at six per cent, then at 80 per cent load it's at 8.5 per cent – so really high duty cycles.”

While tight-lipped about the specific company’s trialling the G Lubricant, Mr Nicols told GoAuto that a number of major fleets around the world are part-way through testing the product with “promising results” so far.

“We’ve got a couple of big fleets trialling it – some of the biggest in the country,” he said.

Breaking down barriers

Graphene’s properties read like something out of a science fiction novel, with the one-atom-thick carbon-based material – first discovered in 2004 – proving extremely conductive, impermeable to gas, and it’s the strongest material ever measured while still being flexible.

The kicker? Graphene is prohibitively expensive, and it’s difficult to achieve consistent quality when extracting it from graphite.

When Mr Nicol started GMG back in 2016, he did so with hopes to break down the barriers preventing the widespread use of graphene as a material of the future.

The team at GMG have since solved the issues of cost and quality with their unique production process, extracting affordable, high-grade Graphene using one of Australia’s most abundant resources – natural gas.

“I’d worked for Shell for 20 years and I just felt like there were always more things we could do with our natural gas than just ship it offshore,” Mr Nicol said.

“We found our process of making natural gas into graphene, and honestly looking back now I had no idea what I was doing. It was a lot of trial and error…5000 trials over a year and a half and we still had no flowing graphene.

“But we’re at a level now which I know nobody else in the world is at – we are making the best graphene we’ve ever made with our new process.”

The best part is, when the gas is microwaved – among other steps in the company’s somewhat secretive process – to extract the graphene, the only by-product is hydrogen – which GMG has future plans to utilise as a renewable fuel source.

An early use case for its graphene, and one that remains a core pillar for the business, is conductive coatings for air-conditioning condensers that offers around a 30 per cent energy saving.

Now, the company hopes to reduce fuel use in large fleets with its G Lubricant additive as its multi-prong suite of sustainability solutions grows.

Decarbonisation ace

Looking further into the future, the company is making inroads into its graphene aluminium-ion battery technology, which is in the prototype stage of development but is already showing major benefits over traditional lithium-ion technology.

So promising are the graphene-aluminium batteries, which offer charge rates that are around 70 times faster than equivalent lithium-based batteries, mining giant Rio Tinto has signed an agreement with GMG to electrify heavy machinery using the technology.

It seems then that all three of GMG’s major focus areas – being paint coatings, oil additives and batteries – promise to offer a smoother transition to net-zero as Australia scrambles to  decarbonise.

“We think graphene will be very, very important in the energy transition in reducing heat and transferring it faster, as well as making better batteries – so that’s why we’ve done what we’ve done,” Mr Nicol said.

“Energy demand around efficiency is not sexy, right? But if we can all consume 10 per cent less fuel per year, the cost reduction and emissions outcome will be there.”