MIT Discovers Way To Mass-Produce Graphene In Large Sheets (inhabitat.com) 62
New submitter Paige.Bennett writes: Up till now, graphene has been produced in small batches in labs. But MIT just found a way to mass-produce graphene in large sheets using a process that rolls out five centimeters of graphene each minute. The longest span so far was nearly four hours, which produced about 10 meters of graphene. According to MIT, here's how their conveyor belt system works: "The first spool unfurls a long strip of copper foil, less than one centimeter wide. When it enters the furnace, the foil is fed through first one tube and then another, in a 'split-zone' design. While the foil rolls through the first tube, it heats up to a certain ideal temperature, at which point it is ready to roll through the second tube, where the scientists pump in a specified ratio of methane and hydrogen gas, which are deposited onto the heated foil to produce graphene." The work has been published in the journal Materials and Interfaces.
Methane? (Score:2, Funny)
Impossible. Methane is an evil substance which must be banned from existence, before the capitalist pigs use it to destroy the world.
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I think you mean capitalist cows?
Now, finally..... (Score:5, Funny)
Sheets is misleading (Score:1)
Re:Sheets is misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you want a square, go to Grolltex. Graphene sheets made by CVD on copper ... this actually does sound a lot like their process.
https://grolltex.com/ [grolltex.com]
What kind of electron mobility is seen in the Grolltex squares? Domain size?
I missed the picture (Score:2)
next step....carbonite (Score:2)
Rip VanWinkle called (Score:2, Funny)
So glad we could wait over 10 years for this. Now where's the transparent aluminum I was promised? Hello Computer!
Re: Rip VanWinkle called (Score:4, Informative)
You can call either the ceramic AION(tm) which is used for bullet and blast resistant windows transparent aluminum, or clear synthetic sapphire which is even stronger than the AION if made by certain processes ( not the artificial gem processes though, they have high internal strain). That sapphire can be 17% stronger than the AION though I haven't seen windows of the stuff only huge balls
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Now where's the transparent aluminum I was promised? Hello Computer!
It exists, stop whining [azom.com].
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That's a ceramic, not a metal. We've had transparent aluminum-based ceramics (corundum) forever.
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Sapphire glass fits the bill
Please explain why did they make such a big deal out of trading the "formula" for "transparent aluminum" in the Star Trek IV movie, when it was just plain old sapphire ?
Re: Rip VanWinkle called (Score:2)
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Not sure if you're being funny, but you probably mean orichalcum [wikipedia.org].
Re:Rip VanWinkle called (Score:4, Informative)
There is no transparent Aluminium.
Transparent aluminum, also known as aluminIum oxynitride, is a transparent polycrystalline ceramic with a cubic spinel crystal structure made of nitrogen, oxygen and aluminIum.
I guess you can use every low atom wight metal to make a 'glass' ...
cluestick cemetery (Score:2)
If this place had any actual engineers, the rate of production would have also been quantified in kg/s. And J/kg, too, with their current rig.
Another SI units argument (Score:3)
If this place had any actual engineers, the rate of production would have also been quantified in kg/s. And J/kg, too, with their current rig.
I'm guessing you aren't from the US if you think actual engineers always us SI units. I'll agree that they SHOULD use SI units but the fact of the matter is that in the real world they often do not.
Is it useful? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not sure how useful a graphene-copper composite is... Article doesn't describe any steps beyond depositing the graphene onto the copper.
The copper is removed in a standard process where (in part) the graphene is floated-off, and captured on a substrate by practice and luck.
Having captured the monolayer, you can then make a test structure or device. It's standard.
again? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a nanotechnologist. Actually, I founded a graphene chip company that actually has a product and customers (Nanomedical Diagnostics).
There are two companies that already produce graphene roll to roll like this (Samsung and Grolltex). Not surprisingly, there's not much of a market for it. There are far fewer people working on graphene applications than on developing the raw material.
There are a few reasons for this. First, investment in commercialization of graphene applications is not popular (because market research is a necessary skill to pitch a product - not so much with a commodity). Second, devices and applications are just harder to make. Most people in my field don't want to work on the kinds of problems that are common in manufacturing (or if they do, they go work for Intel).
The result of all this is that it's actually very easy for someone like me to grow my own graphene (growth tech and know-how is cheap), and it's very hard for a graphene growth company to demonstrate applicability (meeting real industrial cost or QA targets).
In short, a third source of graphene of this type is not needed.
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If companies are making it but noone is buying it, shouldn't that lead to it being cheap to purchase? Certainly someone can figure out a use for it if it's cheap enough. Even if it's not put in a retail box with "NEW! Now with Graphene nanotech!" engineers can incorporate it into construction, perhaps e.g. as a drop-in replacement for carbon fiber.
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If companies are making it but noone is buying it, shouldn't that lead to it being cheap to purchase?
Nobody will make it in quantity if the price is below the cost of production (unless the manufacturer is Elon Musk).
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companies are losing money making it. They can set whatever price they want because at this point they don't really care if they sell all their inventory or not. In a way they save money if they just throw it away and would have been better off, in the short term, to have never manufactured it at all.
Supply and demand assumes there is an operating market. There is no market for this yet, and that is what a few are trying to develop. Having a price war right now is not the right choice.
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You would think that's how it would work, but we've had an oversupply of graphene material in the market for many years now, and the price is still significantly higher than the cost to make it yourself.
I've tried talking with business and marketing people about this, and they say something about "perceived value" and "setting customer expectations." I expect you're right though, if they stopped selling at $10/mm^2 and sold at $0.1/mm^2, we'd see more applications being worked on.
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There are also people not working on graphene applications because the cost of graphene is so high. If graphene base product gets cheaper and more stable, then graphene applications may follow.
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MOD Parent up!
He's right in every respect.
The 'secret sauce' here is simply zone refining of the Cu grains to prepare the surface and maximize properly-oriented domains before the established CVD graphene-deposition itself.
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Given your expertise, I would love to hear your opinion on this other news story from a few days ago (about the use of graphene for filtering water): https://news.google.com/news/s... [google.com]
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Opinion: That's another area where there's been enough university research (just do a Google scholar search for "graphene water filter" and see how far back the papers go). It may be a real opportunity (I don't know the water filtration business), but someone needs to actually work on commercializing it.
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Thanks for taking the time to respond. That makes sense and goes along with what you said in your initial post.
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Depends on the amount of Pu you can scrounge up - It's quite rate in nature so I guess you have to deconstruct some nukes for it first, raid a few nuclear waste sites, or make a reactor capable of fertilizing U238 to Pu239. ... there is in the order of several hundred of
Then again, I think you'll need several tonnes of the stuff if you want to both spread it evenly and letting it have a decently noticeable effect, let alone really screw us up. Getting your hands on such an amount is improbable, but possible
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As if we never thought about "nano" stuff being toxic, which we know graphine is so lets mass produce it and send millions of tons into the ecosphere to make things even more toxic, wait I have an idea! lets go one better and grate Plutonium into mono molecular bits and spread it evenly over the entire planet, surely noting bad could happen!
We already did that before above-ground nuclear testing was banned. I'm sure the byproducts of incomplete reactions are well-dispersed by now.
Plutonium does not exist in nature (not found in earth's crust, that is). Uranium is the only one of the trans-uranic group (OK; Actinides) to be naturally present in Earth's crust. Most decay with short half-lives. A very esoteric field, those materials.
Sure, but when... (Score:1)
pretty neat and about time (Score:5, Interesting)
I am surprised it has taken so long to actually get graphene production up to meaningful levels given the potential uses for the material.
One would think that its potential to drastically increase the output while decreasing the energy requirements for desalinization alone would have have spurred more development.
Not to mention fast charging batteries, insulation, structural components in cars and aircraft, solar cells and tons of other pretty important things.
Would be nice to have super light weight cars.
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nice to have super light weight cars.
Not for the first people ending up in traffic accidents in one where the other side has a car with mass
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the total energy of the collision is reduced, even if my car bounces away like a ping-pong ball.
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Right, like when Will Smith's car was totaled by the robotic truck in "I, Robot"... it moved like it weighed 500 lbs.
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You aren't likely to have an instant-death acceleration problem when you have a 2200 kg SUV and 750 kg ultra-light vehicle collide (a typical mid-sized American car is about 1500 kg). A Corbin Sparrow was about 600 kg, and it mostly just blew into pieces rather than bouncing around. It had issues with strength rather than weight.
As a motorcyclist, I know that if a car collides with me I may be thrown far off my bike and my sudden impact with the ground with my relatively unprotected body may kill me.
If we d
Nice! (Score:2)
Does that mean we can all have our violines mass produced?
Sheets have two Dimensions (Score:2)
Am I the only one here who expects a sheet to have two dimensions? I see that the process produced 10m of graphene. What is the other dimension? If it doesn't have one, then I'd call it a fiber. If it is 1cm, I'd call it a ribbon. The paywalled scientific article has a picture that looks more like a small piece of Scotch tape.
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Am I the only one here who expects a sheet to have two dimensions? I see that the process produced 10m of graphene. What is the other dimension? If it doesn't have one, then I'd call it a fiber. If it is 1cm, I'd call it a ribbon. The paywalled scientific article has a picture that looks more like a small piece of Scotch tape.
It is a 1-cm-wide tape/ribbon Cu substrate.
1 cm x 1 m might be a 'sample run'. Or 100 m. Graphene domain-size is micrometer-scale (usually), so scale-up to a 1-meter-wide sheet would be possible if it were cheap and easy to hot-roll copper down to ribbon that wide. I don't think that is the case here. Marketing. . .
Space Elevator (Score:2)
Now we can get on with creating the Space Elevator of Science speculation.
Will it work? Lets just build one and find out.