In Graphene, Alliance Rubber Meets Possibilities

Alliance Rubber of Hot Springs recently signed an agreement with University of Sussex professor Alan Dalton to study how the compound graphene could be used in rubber products.

But the manufacturer of more than 2,200 rubber products may not see results of this effort go to market for at least 10 years, according to Marketing Director Jason Risner.

Under the agreement, Alliance Rubber is sponsoring two graduate students to work exclusively on graphene projects for three years.

Graphene is “tougher than diamond, but it stretches like rubber,” Risner said. “The actual chemistry of it is very much like rubber. It’s virtually invisible. It can conduct electricity; it can conduct heat, both better than copper wire … It weighs next to nothing.”

“It’s really an astonishing material, and it’s going to, in one way or another, revolutionize our lives,” he said.

Potential applications the company plans to investigate include:

• A rubber band that fits around credit and debit cards with RFID chips and prevents hackers from remotely accessing information stored on the chips.
• A rubber band around produce that changes color when the produce reaches a set temperature or after a certain amount of time passes after harvest.
• A rubber band that acts as a bar code on produce in grocery stores.

Alliance is also giving the U.K.-based research team flexibility, Risner said. “If we run into a situation where we’re not making a lot of headway or we feel like we need to change directions, we certainly can because there’s so many subsections of what this graphene can do.”

Alliance Rubber will meet with the research team once a month, he said.

Risner, along with the company’s new product engineer, Mike Hughes, and its preventive maintenance manager, Joe Jackson, will be involved in the effort.

Risner said Alliance Rubber is investing about the same amount of money in this research as it has spent in the past several years on research and development, though he declined to disclose an exact amount, and emphasized again that it is a long-term investment.