Making Galvorn
Galvorn® is spun from pure carbon in Houston, with a process built for volume.
DexMat dissolves carbon, lines it up in solution, and spins it into continuous fiber and film. The result is a conductor supplied as fiber tow, yarn, fabric, and film, made in a facility certified to ISO 9001:2015.
How is Galvorn made?
Galvorn® is made by wet spinning. DexMat dissolves carbon nanotubes in a solvent, lines them up while they are still in solution, and pushes that solution through a spinneret to make continuous fiber and film, in Houston, Texas. The alignment set in that step is what makes Galvorn® conductive, strong, light, and flexible at any length you can put on a spool.
Galvorn at a glance
What the process delivers and where production stands. The property figures for Galvorn against copper are on the Why Galvorn page; each product's data sheet carries the specification for its grade and form.
Multi-property
One material
Galvorn is conductive, strong, light, and flexible in one material, so it ends the trade-off that makes a designer choose a metal for conductivity and a fiber for strength. The alignment set in the spinning step is what delivers all four at once. The figures for each property are on the Why Galvorn page.
Scalable
3,000x
A process is only useful if it runs at volume. Since founding, DexMat has increased Galvorn production capacity 3,000x and cut production costs 99.6%, on a kind of process the fiber industry already runs at plant scale.
Certified
ISO 9001:2015
Customers in aerospace, automotive, and energy qualify a supplier on process control before they test its material. DexMat's Houston facility is certified to ISO 9001:2015 for the design, development, manufacture, characterization, and supply of Galvorn fiber, yarn, and film.
Step one: dissolve
Carbon goes into solution, not into a melt.
Galvorn starts as carbon nanotube feedstock, which DexMat sources from established producers and inspects on receipt. Nanotubes do not melt, so they cannot be drawn like a metal or extruded like a plastic. Instead, DexMat dissolves them in a solvent that separates the tubes from one another and keeps them intact.
Step two: align and spin
In solution, the nanotubes line up on their own.
At the right concentration, long and stiff molecules in a solution pack side by side, a state called a liquid crystal. DexMat pushes that solution through a spinneret, a plate with fine holes, into a bath that pulls out the solvent and locks the aligned tubes into a solid filament. The filament is washed, dried, and wound onto a spool as continuous fiber, or spread through a slot to make film.
This is wet spinning, the same family of processes that makes viscose fabrics and Kevlar, and it is a process the fiber industry already runs at plant scale.
Think logs on a river: at the right concentration the nanotubes line up side by side on their own, and the spinneret turns that order into a fiber.
Step three: form
Fiber becomes tow, yarn, braid, fabric, and film.
A single spun filament is so fine that it is difficult to handle on its own, so DexMat bundles filaments into fiber tow. That tow can be twisted into yarn, or braided (yarn over a core, or as a hollow braid). Yarn is knitted into fabric, with woven and custom constructions by special order.
Film is spun directly as a thin ribbon. Every form is the same aligned carbon. The construction sets the diameter, stiffness, and handling of what you receive; the chemistry does not change. DexMat supplies the material, and you build the wire, cable, shielding, or finished component.
Why alignment matters
Alignment is where the properties come from.
In a fiber made of many short tubes, current and mechanical load both have to pass from tube to tube. The farther each can travel along a tube before it jumps, the better the fiber conducts and the stronger it is. Galvorn's spinning process packs the nanotubes densely and aligns them along the fiber axis, so those paths are long and the jumps are few.
A single Galvorn filament is 50x stronger than copper per unit mass (tenacity 2.00 vs 0.04 N/tex) and conducts heat at 450 W/m-K against 385 for copper. These are single filament figures; yarns and films are lower, and each product's specification lists them by size.
The same structure bends without the fatigue that limits metal wire. In bending fatigue tests at Rice University, a fiber of this material survived more than a billion bending cycles without breaking. Copper wire in the same test rig failed before one million.
50x
stronger than copper per unit mass, single filament
450 W/m-K
thermal conductivity, single filament, against 385 for copper
1 billion+
bending cycles without breaking, Rice University test
Built to run at scale
Spun in Houston, shipping today.
DexMat produces Galvorn at its Houston, Texas facility and ships it today to customers globally. The spinning process was developed at Rice University, where the team that became DexMat's founding scientists demonstrated the first fiber with both high conductivity and high strength in 2013, and DexMat was founded in 2019 to run it at industrial scale. Since founding, DexMat has increased production capacity 3,000x and cut production costs 99.6%. In September 2026, after a year of cost reduction work, DexMat cut standard store prices by about half.
Growing Galvorn production means scaling a kind of plant the fiber industry already knows how to run. Galvorn is wet-spun: a solution goes through a spinneret into a bath that solidifies it, and the filament is washed, dried, and wound onto a spool. That is the same family of processes behind viscose rayon, spun commercially since the early 1900s, and aramid fibers like Kevlar, which are also spun from a liquid-crystal solution. A single viscose plant can spin more than 300,000 tons a year, and a single aramid operation more than 20,000, in plants built around the same unit operations DexMat runs in Houston today. DexMat brings the solution chemistry and the fiber handling to an industrial platform of equipment, plant designs, and operating know-how that only needs to be adapted to our process, so scaling means adding more and larger lines of a known type.
Looking further out, our production roadmap turns abundant domestic natural gas into a secure supply of conductive material at scale. On that roadmap, methane is split into solid carbon and hydrogen, so one feedstock yields two products: the carbon becomes Galvorn, and the hydrogen comes off as a clean energy byproduct. Our prospective life cycle analysis sets out what this means for Galvorn's carbon footprint today and at scale.
Quality you can audit
Certified to ISO 9001:2015, and every spool is measured before it ships.
A new conductor earns a place on an approved vendor list through its process control as much as its properties. Each spool of Galvorn is measured and checked against its product specification before it is released to ship.
DexMat's quality management system is certified to ISO 9001:2015 by ABS Quality Evaluations under Certificate No. QMS10657, covering the design, development, manufacture, characterization, and supply of Galvorn fiber, yarn, and film products at the Houston facility. The certificate is available on request.
Video: Brandon Martin/Rice University.
Pure carbon in, pure carbon out
Galvorn can be recycled.
A material built for long service should have an end of life that is not a landfill. Carbon fiber loses properties when it is recycled, so it is downcycled into short, weaker pieces. Galvorn is carbon from end to end, and the same chemistry that makes it can take it apart.
In a 2025 Rice University study, Galvorn fiber was recycled once, dissolved and spun again, and the new fiber kept its properties within 5% of the original. The study covers a single recycling cycle.
Product forms
Every form comes from the same spun fiber.
Sizes are the standard store sizes; larger sizes and custom constructions are available by special order.
| Product | Standard sizes | How it is made | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Galvorn® 1000 Fiber Tow, Galvorn® 800 Fiber Tow | 5 to 200 filaments per tow, 1 to 5,000 m | Spun filaments bundled, untwisted | Electrodes, sensors, composites, and fiber-level integration |
| Galvorn® 1000 Twisted Yarn, Galvorn® 800 Twisted Yarn | 150, 200, and 500 µm (Galvorn® 1000); 400 µm (Galvorn® 800); 1 to 2,000 m | Multifilament tow twisted to hold the filaments together | Signal and data wire, lightweight conductors, textiles |
| Galvorn® 1000 Braided Yarn | 1,000 µm; 1 to 2,000 m | Yarns braided over a core, or as a hollow braid | High-flex conductors, abrasion resistance |
| Galvorn® Fabric | 3 x 3 inch samples (Galvorn® 800 or Galvorn® 1000 yarn) | Yarn knitted into fabric; woven constructions by special order | Flat conductors, flexible cable assemblies, composite layers |
| Galvorn® F10 Film | 1 cm and 2 cm wide, 10 to 20 µm thick; 1 to 100 m | Spun directly as a thin ribbon | EMI shielding layers, flat transmission, conformal conductive elements |
Who it is for
For the people who ask how it's made before they ask how it performs.
This page is for the engineer evaluating a conductor who wants to know what is in it and how it is made before running a test, for the quality and procurement teams who qualify a supplier on process control, and for the researcher who wants the chemistry behind the numbers. If you are deciding whether Galvorn fits an application, start with Why Galvorn and the applications pages.
FAQ
Common questions
Yes. Galvorn is made by dissolving carbon nanotubes in a solvent, aligning them in solution, and spinning them into continuous fiber or film. On their own, nanotubes are only microns long and were sold for decades as a powder additive; spinning them into aligned fiber is what makes Galvorn conductive and strong at lengths you can build with. The finished material is aligned carbon from end to end, supplied as fiber tow, twisted yarn, braided yarn, fabric, and film.
See the process in the material.
Order sample quantities of any Galvorn form from the store, download the data sheet for the specification of each grade and size, or talk to a DexMat engineer about a custom construction.