kemist
08-06-2011, 11:10 AM
Graphene From Garbage http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/89/i32/8932notw8.html
The Rice team, led by James M. Tour (http://www.jmtour.com/), has shown that there’s no need to use costly purified starting materials to grow graphene. The team, which also includes Gedeng Ruan, Zhengzong Sun, and Zhiwei Peng, prepared graphene from feces, grass, a cockroach leg, bulk polystyrene, chocolate, and Girl Scout cookies.
In all cases, the group placed a solid sample on copper foil in a quartz boat and briefly heated the material to 1,050 °C under a low-pressure hydrogen-argon flow. The team reports that residues containing several elements remained on the sample side of the foil after heat treatment. On the back side, however, they found pristine and nearly defect-free graphene, as judged from analyses based on Raman, UV-visible, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies and microscopy analysis.
“These results show convincingly that large-scale high-quality graphene can be grown from impure carbon sources with low or negative values,” says Changgan Zeng (http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~cgzeng/zeng_en/about me.html) of the University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei. “This is quite amazing, since we usually assume that high-quality graphene requires pure carbon sources,” Zeng says. He adds that “the idea is brilliant,” but the mechanism by which graphene forms on the back of the foil is still unknown.
The research results seems to be authentic. Graphene could already revolutionize material applications as we know it. If there is a way to give it semiconductor properties, it would mean major advances in the computer industry too.
In addition, if it can be made from atmospheric carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, that would indeed be interesting.
Here's a little info on graphene; this article seems to be objective on its advantages and limitations:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9491789.stm
The Rice team, led by James M. Tour (http://www.jmtour.com/), has shown that there’s no need to use costly purified starting materials to grow graphene. The team, which also includes Gedeng Ruan, Zhengzong Sun, and Zhiwei Peng, prepared graphene from feces, grass, a cockroach leg, bulk polystyrene, chocolate, and Girl Scout cookies.
In all cases, the group placed a solid sample on copper foil in a quartz boat and briefly heated the material to 1,050 °C under a low-pressure hydrogen-argon flow. The team reports that residues containing several elements remained on the sample side of the foil after heat treatment. On the back side, however, they found pristine and nearly defect-free graphene, as judged from analyses based on Raman, UV-visible, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies and microscopy analysis.
“These results show convincingly that large-scale high-quality graphene can be grown from impure carbon sources with low or negative values,” says Changgan Zeng (http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~cgzeng/zeng_en/about me.html) of the University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei. “This is quite amazing, since we usually assume that high-quality graphene requires pure carbon sources,” Zeng says. He adds that “the idea is brilliant,” but the mechanism by which graphene forms on the back of the foil is still unknown.
The research results seems to be authentic. Graphene could already revolutionize material applications as we know it. If there is a way to give it semiconductor properties, it would mean major advances in the computer industry too.
In addition, if it can be made from atmospheric carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, that would indeed be interesting.
Here's a little info on graphene; this article seems to be objective on its advantages and limitations:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9491789.stm