Lucky errors led to a process to make Graphene very quickly, much cheaper and in a more pure state.
Hope so... Mankind could use another stunning breakthrough in material technology.
Hope we may be entering the Age of Grapheme, that could create revolutionary new product applications.
It may be used in multiple fields, to make much better batteries, to create unique applications for better electronic products and to greatly improving strength of products.
From the full article at the link...
New cool process to make graphene cheaper & better
Hope so... Mankind could use another stunning breakthrough in material technology.
Hope we may be entering the Age of Grapheme, that could create revolutionary new product applications.
It may be used in multiple fields, to make much better batteries, to create unique applications for better electronic products and to greatly improving strength of products.
From the full article at the link...
Scientists develop cool process to make better graphene (and much cheaper)
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Date: March 18, 2015
Source: California Institute of Technology
These are images of early-stage growth of graphene on copper. The lines of hexagons are graphene nuclei, with increasing magnification from left to right, where the scale bars from left to right correspond to 10 m, 1 m, and 200 nm, respectively. The hexagons grow together into a seamless sheet of graphene.
Credit: Courtesy of D. Boyd and N. Yeh labs/Caltech
Summary:
A new technique to produce graphene -- a material made up of an atom-thick layer of carbon -- at room temperature could help pave the way for commercially feasible graphene-based solar cells and light-emitting diodes, large-panel displays, and flexible electronics.
"With this new technique, we can grow large sheets of electronic-grade graphene in much less time and at much lower temperatures," says Caltech staff scientist David Boyd, who developed the method.
Boyd is the first author of a new study, published in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature Communications, detailing the new manufacturing process and the novel properties of the graphene it produces.
Graphene could revolutionize a variety of engineering and scientific fields due to its unique properties, which include a tensile strength 200 times stronger than steel and an electrical mobility that is two to three orders of magnitude better than silicon. The electrical mobility of a material is a measure of how easily electrons can travel across its surface.
During one of his attempts to reproduce the experiment, the phone rang. While Boyd took the call, he unintentionally let a copper foil heat for longer than usual before exposing it to methane vapor, which provides the carbon atoms needed for graphene growth.
When later Boyd examined the copper plate using Raman spectroscopy, a technique used for detecting and identifying graphene, he saw evidence that a graphene layer had indeed formed. "It was an 'A-ha!' moment," Boyd says. "I realized then that the trick to growth is to have a very clean surface, one without the copper oxide."
At first, Boyd could not figure out why the technique was so successful. He later discovered that two leaky valves were letting in trace amounts of methane into the experiment chamber. "The valves were letting in just the right amount of methane for graphene to grow," he says.
The ability to produce graphene without the need for active heating not only reduces manufacturing costs, but also results in a better product because fewer defects--introduced as a result of thermal expansion and contraction processes--are generated. This in turn eliminates the need for multiple postproduction steps.
"Typically, it takes about ten hours and nine to ten different steps to make a batch of high-mobility graphene using high-temperature growth methods," Yeh says.
"Our process involves one step, and it takes five minutes."
Scanning tunneling microscopic images showing individual carbon molecules that make up sheet of graphene.
A scaled-up version of their plasma technique could open the door for new kinds of electronics manufacturing, Yeh says. For example, graphene sheets with low concentrations of defects could be used to protect materials against degradation from exposure to the environment.
Another possibility would be to grow large sheets of graphene that can be used as a transparent conducting electrode for solar cells and display panels. "In the future, you could have graphene-based cell-phone displays that generate their own power"
New cool process to make graphene cheaper & better
