Cleaning up Graphene by Heartsound Audio


Graphene has been called "the wonder material of the 21st century." Since its initial discovery in 2004, the material (a single layer of carbon atoms) has been celebrated for a host of unique properties, which include ultra-high electrical conductivity and remarkable tensile strength. It has the potential to transform electronics, energy storage, water purification, sensors, biomedical devices and more.

But graphene has a dirty little secret.... it's dirty.

Engineers at Columbia and University of Montreal with the National Institute of Standards and Technology are poised to clean this up with an oxygen-free vapor deposition (OF-CVD).  This will create cleaner samples of high quality graphene at scale. Their work, published last month in Nature, closely demonstrates how trace oxygen affects the growth rate of Graphene and solidifies the link between oxygen and Graphene for the first time. 

Graphene historically has been synthesized in one of two ways. There’s the “scotch tape”  method, In which individual layers are peeled from a bulk sample of graphite using household tape. Such exfoliation samples can be quite clean and free from impurities that would otherwise interfere with Graphene’ s desirable properties. However, they tend to be too small - A few tens of micro meters across - small For industrial scale applications, and better suited for lab research. 

There were several problems with an upscale CVD. Oxygen was still the main issue, so six years ago Christopher DiMarco Created a process to carefully control the oxygen introduced during the deposition process. Turns out even trace oxygen in samples was considered “dirty”. Once completely eliminated, the CVD growth was much faster, and the quality of the samples was identical to the exfoliated Graphene.

From here? Onward.

Scientist have plans to develop a method to clearly transfer the high-quality graphene from the metal growth catalyst to other substrates like silicon. This new strategy for using Graphene in industry should affect the future marketplace.


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