a team of researchers from the rutgers university institute for advanced materials, devices, and nanotechnology worked with engineers from ulsan national institute of science and technology (nsit) in south korea to discover that using a microwave oven can quickly produce high-quality graphene.
professor manish chhowalla and jieun yang, a post-doctoral associate and co-lead author of the study. (muharrem acerce)
the team’s effort was outlined in a story from september on the rutgers website.
graphene is a highly-researched material that offers great potential due to its electrical and thermal conductivity along with several other properties that have engineers dreaming of its use in numerous applications.
the major block to its commercialization has been the lack of a process for mass production without the need for chemicals and without producing graphene oxide, which lacks the electrical conductivity that makes graphene such a highly-desired material.
the researchers at rutgers discovered that baking exfoliated graphene oxide for one second in a 1,000-watt microwave (same as the microwaves that are used in homes across the world) eliminates “virtually all of the oxygen from graphene oxide.”
the research was published in science early in the fall. the abstract from the report read:
“efficient exfoliation of graphite in solutions to obtain high-quality graphene flakes is desirable for printable electronics, catalysis, energy storage, and composites. graphite oxide with large lateral dimensions has an exfoliation yield of ~100% but it has not been possible to completely remove the oxygen functional groups so that the reduced form of graphene oxide (go) remains a highly disordered material.
“here, we report a simple, rapid method to reduce go (rgo) into pristine graphene using 1- to 2-second pulses of microwaves. the excellent structural properties are translated into mobility values of > 1000 centimeter squared per volt per second in field effect transistors (fets) with mw-rgo as the channel material and in exceptionally high activity for mw-rgo catalyst support toward oxygen evolution reaction (oer).”
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