5/30/2010 PERMALINK
Researchers convert long used chemical industry method to cheaply fab pure graphene. Rice University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology : In a development that could lead to new carbon composites and touch-screen displays, researchers have unveiled a new method for producing bulk quantities of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon called graphene. It wasn't until 2004 that stand-alone sheets of graphene were first characterized with modern nanotechnological instruments. Since then, graphene has come under intense scrutiny from materials scientists, in part because it is both ultrastrong and highly conductive. 'There are high-throughput methods for making graphene oxide, which is not as conductive as graphene, and there are low-throughput methods for making pure graphene,' said lead co-author Matteo Pasquali, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and chemistry at Rice. 'Our method yields very pure material, and it is based on bulk fluid-processing techniques that have long been used by the chemical industry.'