- Title: IRELAND: Large scale graphene production starts in the kitchen
- Date: 15th May 2014
- Summary: MANCHESTER, ENGLAND, UK (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF RESEARCHER, SEPARATING LAYERS OF GRAPHENE WITH TAPE GRAPHITE FLAKE HELD UP WITH TWEEZERS GAZA CITY, GAZA (FILE) (REUTERS) VIEW OF EMPTY PLASTIC BOTTLES ON BOTTLING MACHINE AT JUICE FACTORY VARIOUS OF MACHINES FILLING BOTTLES WITH JUICE AT FACTORY
- Embargoed: 30th May 2014 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Gaza, Ireland, United Kingdom
- City:
- Country: Ireland
- Topics: Technology
- Reuters ID: LVA58JO83MZ7ZS38HTQWFFON1QYB
- Story Text: Irish scientists have broken new ground in the effort to speed up production of the 'wonder material' graphene - by mixing it with soap and water in a common kitchen blender. They believe the method could be adapted on an industrial scale to allow the mass production of a material whose strength and conductivity are likely to transform common products.
Irish scientists have been able to produce graphene in a common household blender, an achievement thay say demonstrates the possibilities for industrialising graphene production to make the so-called "wonder material" available for a variety of industries and new products.
The researchers at the AMBER (Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research) science centre at Trinity College Dublin showed that the shearing force generated by a rapidly rotating blade of a blender was sufficiently intense to separate the layers of graphene that make up graphite flakes without damaging their two-dimensional structure. They simply mixed it with soap and water in a common kitchen blender.
Graphene is one of the strongest materials known, yet it forms perfectly flat sheets just one atom thick. It comes from graphite, a soft carbon substance, which forms layers and layers of sheets that stick together. The challenge is managing to separate just one layer, given it is no thicker than a single carbon atom.
The researchers at AMBER, the materials science centre based at Trinity College Dublin, have developed a water-based method to slide one sheet off the top at a time, like slipping one card after another off a deck of cards. The key to their method is floating graphite in water and spinning it with a rotor to make the graphene sheets separate from one another. They then add a surfactant, or soap, that sticks to the sheets and keeps the sheets apart.
Pointing to a blender filled with the surfactant-water-graphite/graphine dispersion, Professor Jonathan Coleman, principal investigator at AMBER, said the method was relatively straightforward.
"This is the first stage of graphene production, so here we have put graphite in this blender. We've added water and a surfactant and you blend it up and you get this sort of black liquid and you notice that there are some suds there, that's due to the surfactant, and this is where the graphene is. At this early stage there's also graphite in there, so we have to go through a processing stage where we separate the graphite from the graphene and when we do that we get this nice black liquid here and what this is is graphene in water with surfactant," he said.
Graphene is regarded by many scientists as having the potential to revolutionise products from electronics and plastics to touchscreens and batteries. A hundred times stronger than steel, it conducts electricity better than copper and has been touted as a possible replacement for silicon in electronics. It is, though, notoriously difficult to produce in large amounts of the highest quality and of a consistent size. Competing laboratories around the world are engaged in trying to deliver it on an industrial scale.
"It's very very strong mechanically, it's got good electrical conductivity, and so people think for example that if you mix it into a plastic you'll make the plastic stronger, and we know for example that a very very small amount of graphene can double or even triple the strength of plastic. There will be many applications that will involve its conductivity, so if you make a very very thin layer of graphene on a surface that layer is conductive and so, for example, it can be used as electrodes in solar cells or batteries. This liquid here that contains graphene, that can be sprayed to form thin films or even printed out of an inkjet printer, so you can imagine making inkjet-printed batteries or electrodes for printed electronics," said Coleman.
Already aware of AMBER's early research on graphene production, UK-based chemical manufacturers Thomas Swan approached Coleman's team to help scale up the process two years ago.
"One of the things that's been holding this back is a supply of large scale, large quantities of graphene, good quality graphene, at reasonably low cost and this research that we've been carrying out here has opened up a route to obtain these," said Thomas Swan Project Leader for Graphene, Keith Paton.
The collaboration resulted last month to the commercial production of two patented Thomas Swan products - Elicarb(R) Graphene Powder and "licarb(TM) Graphene Aqueous Dispersion that can be added to inkjet-printers to make viable batteries or printed electronics.
Coleman says that, although people could replicate their work themselves, it would be not advisable to do so at home.
"Here graphene was produced in what is essentially a kitchen blender, but that's not how it will be done commercially. There will be big industrial scale blenders that will do this at a very large scale. It can be done in a kitchen blender but you would really have to have the right recipe, the right amounts of graphite, the right amount of water, the right amount of surfactant, and afterwards you really wouldn't want to use the blender again because you can see it's covered with graphene residue and I don't think you want that in your soup or your smoothies," said Coleman.
Graphene will have a multitude of potential applications, including advanced food packaging, high- strength plastics, foldable touchscreens for mobile phones and laptops, faster broadband and batteries with dramatically higher capacity. In addition, graphene could have applications in water treatment, oil spill clean-up and even in the production of thinner condoms. AMBER and Thomas Swan hope to have a plant that could produce a kilo of graphene per day up and running by the end of the year. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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