Domestic cold-proof and heating products are constantly innovating "warm economy" and playing new tricks

Since the beginning of winter, many rounds of cold air have affected most parts of the country from north to south, and the temperature continues to drop. Corresponding to the colder and colder weather, the sales of all kinds of cold-proof heating products are getting hotter and hotter. Electric heaters made of graphene materials, down jackets that are thinner and more fashionable while keeping warm, and smart warm small household appliances with various patterns ... Domestic cold-proof and heating products are constantly innovating, bringing warmth in winter to consumers with a new image with a more scientific and technological sense.

The heater is made of new materials.

Electric heater is one of the most commonly used heating equipment for people in winter. Recently, many domestic appliance brands have introduced new electric heaters using graphene materials, claiming that they have the advantages of "rapid heat conduction", "rapid temperature rise" and "uniform heat generation". As the new favorite of the winter consumer market, does graphene electric heater really have better heating performance?

"Graphene is a new carbon material that has attracted much attention in recent years. It does have some excellent characteristics and has broad application prospects in many fields." Yanwu Zhu, a professor at the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Science and Technology of China, told reporters that graphene materials can be used in heating products, mainly because of its excellent electrical and thermal conductivity. It is light and thin, and its properties are very stable, and it is not easy to be corroded.

According to Yanwu Zhu, graphene is a single-layer sheet structure composed of carbon atoms. Graphene can be obtained by stripping the natural graphite layer by layer into a single-layer structure. Graphite with a thickness of 1mm contains about 3 million layers of graphene, but the stripping process requires high technical content.

This new material, which is full of scientific and technological content and not low in production cost, has appeared in high-tech fields such as aerospace, electronics and new energy before. But in recent years, graphene has quickly "entered the homes of ordinary people" and become more "close to the people". The reporter searched the e-commerce platform and found that the price of many domestic graphene electric heaters is not high, ranging from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars. Why is this?

Yanwu Zhu said that the factors affecting the price of graphene electric heaters are actually complicated. In addition to the cost of brand and design, specifically for graphene components, on the one hand, the characteristics of graphene raw materials used are different and the cost is different. On the other hand, graphene appears in different ways in the equipment, resulting in different dosage. For example, some electric heaters directly heat graphene materials or composite materials instead of traditional resistance wires; Some are still heated by metal wires, but graphene is added to the heat dissipation part to speed up the heat transfer.

From a macro perspective, with the rapid development of graphene industry in China, the overall cost of graphene raw materials has dropped significantly. In recent years, China has become one of the most active countries in the development and industrialization of graphene in the world, and the market scale of related products is constantly expanding. "Now the price of some types of graphene raw materials has dropped to several hundred thousand yuan a ton, that is, a few cents a gram. Graphene used in small household appliances like electric heaters, if the total amount does not need too much, the cost associated with graphene will not be too high. " Yanwu Zhu said.

At the same time, experts reminded that behind the "explosion" of graphene electric heaters, there is still much room for improvement in related industries. Yanwu Zhu believes that at present, there is still a lack of corresponding standards for such products, while some small enterprises only use this concept, and their R&D capabilities need to be improved. Next, we need to make full use of the advantages of graphene monolayer structure through technological progress.

Yang Quanhong, a professor at Tianjin University School of Chemical Engineering, also said in an interview that graphene electric heater industry should make efforts to improve quality and efficiency. "At present, there is no essential difference between the action mechanism of graphene electric heaters and traditional metal resistance wires and other carbon heaters. How to optimize the structure of graphene heating devices, give full play to the advantages of high efficiency and stable heating of graphene heaters, and truly create a unique brand of graphene, so as to achieve sustainable development, is a problem that needs the joint efforts of industry and academia. "

In fact, not only graphene heaters, but also the overall development of domestic graphene industry needs to continue to make efforts in the direction of improving quality and increasing speed. Some experts pointed out that although the current market has high expectations for graphene, the domestic graphene industry still cannot meet the market needs. On the technical level, how to improve the quality of materials, maintain the consistency of the quality of different batches of materials and further reduce the related costs during the preparation of graphene still needs to be explored continuously.