After reading about graphene for over a month, I’m fascinated by the opportunity to commercialize useful applications of this material.
Articles like the following captured my attention: http://engineering.columbia.edu/even-defects-graphene-strongest-material-world
Methods according to http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/2013/02/26/graphene-the-quest-to-mass-produce-the-next-miracle-material/:
A) “Researchers at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently developed a new method of creating graphene via chemical vapor deposition at atmospheric pressure, which could allow them to produce greater quantities for production use. Whereas “[m]ost labs in the universities prepare pieces of one to three inches in size at most,” as physical chemist Ivan Vlassiouk told Txchnologist, the Oak Ridge team is capable of producing sheets that measure 40 inches in the diagonal”
B) “Scientists in South Korea and Case Western Reserve University claim to have discovered that method via dry ice and a turning operation. The researchers placed graphite and frozen carbon dioxide into a ball miller, a small container of stainless steel balls, and spent two days turning it. The cumulative force produced small flakes of graphite, which were then placed in a protic solvent of water and methanol. In the solvent, the graphite flakes combined and formed larger sheets of layered graphene.”
““We have developed a low-cost, easier way to mass produce better graphene sheets than the current, widely-used method of acid oxidation, which requires the tedious application of toxic chemicals,” Liming Dai, professor of macromolecular science and engineering at Case Western Reserve and a co-author of the paper announcing the findings, told Science Daily”
C) “Elsewhere, Northern Illinois University (NIU) researchers are also using dry ice, but coupled with magnesium. The NIU team was attempting to create single-wall carbon nanotubes, but instead discovered that by burning pure magnesium in frozen carbon dioxide, they could create layered sheets of graphene approximately 10 atoms thick.”
