Context: Recently, State government of Kerala announced the country’s first Graphene Innovation Centre, a joint venture of Digital University of Kerala, Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET) and Tata Steel Limited come up in Ernakulam.

About the Centre

• It is a cross-functional plan that creates a safe haven for new ideas.
• With opportunities for individual and group collaboration across time zones and continents, it's a place that fosters a culture of innovation through the creation, sharing, and testing of ideas.

Key Significance

• The project would give a major fillip for scientific research as well as the state’s industrial sector.
• Kerala’s human resources capital could be effectively exploited by the proposed Centre, which would help Kerala to emerge as a knowledge-based economy.

About Graphene

• Graphene is the allotrope of Carbon (C), arranged in a crystalline regular hexagonal pattern, making a covalent bond.
• In chemistry terms, allotropes are structurally different forms of the same element.

Use

• Graphite is used in pencils and lubricants. Its high conductivity makes it useful in electronic products like electrodes, batteries, solar panels etc.
• Graphene is called as a wonder material due to its vast potential in the energy and medical world.

Graphite

• Graphite is a mineral that is composed of graphene.

Properties

• It is the most electrically and thermally conductive material in the world.
• It is the thinnest, flexible, transparent, and incredibly strong.