Polymer-Based Graphene Substitute Is Easy To Mass-Produce

Zothecula writes: For all the attention graphene gets thanks to its impressive list of properties, how many of us have actually encountered it in anything other than its raw graphite form? Show of hands. No-one? That's because it is still difficult to mass-produce without introducing defects. Now a team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology has developed a graphene substitute from plastic that offers the benefits of graphene for use in solar cells and semiconductor chips, but is easy to mass-produce (abstract).

Comments

Re:substitute?

[rubycodez]

graphene has been used for over a century, stacked and bonded in pencils

Re:substitute?

[mark-t]

That would be graphITE

Re:substitute?

[tomxor]

beat me to it :P

What could be easier than pencils and Scotch tape?

[drwho]

I mean, really...

Re:What could be easier than pencils and Scotch ta

[mark-t]

While cheap and easy, that's not overly suited for mass production.

Re:substitute?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

Wiki:

Crystalline flake graphite (or flake graphite for short) occurs as isolated, flat, plate-like particles with hexagonal edges if unbroken and when broken the edges can be irregular or angular;

stacked and bonded

Wiki:

In graphene, carbon atoms are densely packed in a regular sp2-bonded atomic-scale chicken wire (hexagonal) pattern.

Re:substitute?

[mark-t]

But the stuff in pencils still ins't graphene.

Re:What could be easier than pencils and Scotch ta

[Em Adespoton]

While cheap and easy, that's not overly suited for mass production.

I'm sure 3M could work something out....

Re:Cheaper Solar Cells !

[GameboyRMH]

Patent to be purchased by fossil fuel company in 3,2,1...

Ahem

[war4peace]

Let me know when it's mass-produced.

So what exactly are the properties?

[Baldrson]

They don't say it has _all_ the properties of defect-free graphene -- so, what properties are mismatched? Just the important ones?

Re:So what exactly are the properties?

[Blaskowicz]

Yes. I hyped myself about capacitors good enough to replace batteries, and graphene is good for that use. No idea if the substitute is any useful there.

I have used some

[penguinoid]

I regularly use graphene stacked in several layers so that the layers can slide off each other, with a little clay mixed in for harness. I use it to produce flexible, resilient optical communications devices that can be folded like paper, with a longer lifetime than most magnetic or charge-based storage devices.

Re:I have used some

[rubycodez]

they should come up with a cool name for your marvelous device, like a pensyllabuscil

Confusing article

[marciot]

Is the end result graphene, a lattice of carbon atoms, or not? What exactly is a "substitute carbon nanosheet" if not graphene itself? Is the process new or the material new? This article is like saying you developed an easier process for creating wood-pulp-based white laminar sheets that are flexible and suitable for writing letters and calling it a "paper substitute", without clearly saying why it isn't paper.

Re:Confusing article

[radtea]

What exactly is a "substitute carbon nanosheet"

Reading between the lines, it looks like it is a thin layer of mixed carbon and hydrogen with a structure that they have not yet properly characterized but which they have shown has the properties required for transparent electrodes in solar cells.

Specifically, they say the properties of the layer can be controlled by the properties of the polymer they start with, which suggests that it partakes in the polymer's nature, which would mean it is more than just a single layer of carbon atoms.

They may be being cautious and simply saying it is "graphene-like-enough" for this application, but having not fully characterized it may not want to claim it is "truly" graphene, which is a fairly vague term for a variety of single-sheet carbon materials that may have a variety of defects, in just the same was as "paper" is also fairly vague (from tissue to construction.)

Re:Confusing article

[rubycodez]

if bonded there is a name for mixed carbon and hydrogen in a mostly carbon matrix, coal

Re:Confusing article

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Is the end result graphene, a lattice of carbon atoms, or not? What exactly is a "substitute carbon nanosheet" if not graphene itself?

It sounds to me like they're hedging because they haven't fully characterized what they get.

As I undetstand it, producing carbon fiber from plastic consists of stretching a plastic (such as rayon - a string of carbon hexagons joined by oxygen links, or polyacriolnitrile - a carbon backbone with a C2N group hanging off every other carbon) so the long-chains are alligned, then baking off the other elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen). This leaves just the carbon backbones (with additional carbon-carbon bonds from the loss of the hydrogen and whatever. Result: long, narrow, straight or crumpled ribbons of graphite-like hexagons, in a bundle, perhaps with occasional crosslinks, side-bumps, and other debris.

So I'd think that, if they did this on a surface, with something that didn't polmerize in two dimensions, they wouldn't end up with the nice, clean, carbon chicken-wire fence of graphine. Instead they'd end up with little graphine patches and strips, interconnected irregularly, and not restricted to an atom-thick plane.

But I'd expect the result to, like graphene, conduct well and be very strong. Just not as strong and conductive as a perfect graphene layer, perhaps with some odd electrical activity from the deviations from the regular structure acting as "impurities', and higher resistance due to shorter mean free paths for charge carriers as they bump into these irregularities.

Re:substitute?

[rubycodez]

which is graphene bonded and stacked

Re:substitute?

[rubycodez]

yes it is, it is graphene bonded and stacked, look it up. that is the reason pencils can write, by the way

Re:substitute?

[rubycodez]

and you would have been wrong. graphite is nothing more than stacked and bonded graphene sheets

Re:substitute?

[rubycodez]

That's rich coming from an AC who can't form a complete sentence.

Re:What could be easier than pencils and Scotch ta

[peragrin]

I have worked with 3M on custom adhesive tapes . I have doubts about that some days.

Re:substitute?

[Zerth]

Considering the 2010 Nobel prize in physics was won by a pair who made grapheme by simply cleaving graphite with tape, I'd say you really need to use your head.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

Slashdot is not generally a primary source.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This was on Gizmag yesterday... like many of Slashdot's articles...

Give it a rest.

Slashdot is not an investigative journal or a follower-and-repeater of press releases. It's a bunch of nerds pointing out interesting stuff to each other, and talking it over, with a few nerds vetting the postings before they go up on the "front page".

That means, like Wikipedia, it's not generally a primary source. It also means that, for real news items, it is generally about a day behind.

If you want news in a timely fashion, go read Gizmag and a bunch of other acutal reportage sites. If you're willing to wait a little bit and then talk it over with a crowd of acquaintences (some of whom might actually know more about it than the newsies), this is the place for you.