Not a week passes by these days without news of an amazing application for our favorite wonder-material, graphene. This week, it’s making headlines for a different reason, though. MIT researchers have reported successful laboratory testing for a new technique that solves what is easily the biggest problem we have with graphene: the ability to put it into mass production. This new method could facilitate the fabrication of graphene in large, continuous sheets.

This process is not entirely new, but an adaptation of the chemical-vapor-deposition method already commonly used to make graphene. Instead of a vacuum chamber, where graphene is deposited on a substrate, this new method lets a metal ribbon slide within two concentric tubes at 1,000 degrees Celsius where the graphene will be deposited.

The technique allows the researchers to obtain a continuous ribbon of graphene, whose width is scalable, since it’s only constrained by the size of the concentric tubes forming the deposition chamber. Also, being a continuous process, it does not need to keep stopping and restarting to charge and collect materials for the deposition chamber, so the amount of graphene produced ends up being much higher.

Here a graphic illustrating how the manufacturing process works:

The above diagram of the roll-to-roll process (a) shows the arrangement of copper spools at each end of the processing tube, and how a ribbon of thin copper substrate is wound around the central tube. A cross-section view of the same setup (b) shows the gap between two tubes, where the chemical vapor deposition process occurs. Next up are photos of the system being tested: (c) the overall system, with an arrow indicating the direction the ribbon is moving; (d) a closeup of the copper ribbon inside the apparatus, showing the holes where chemical vapor is injected; and (e) an overhead view of the copper foil passing through the system.

The resulting quality of the graphene depends on the speed at which it is produced. If the ribbon slips at 25 millimeters per minute, then a layer of uniform high-quality graphene is created (though without matching the highest quality achieved by traditional methods). If we increase the tape speed (and therefore the production output) to 50 centimeters per minute, then a layer of graphene is still created over the ribbon, but it’s now of lower quality, with more defects. That said, each product will have a market, since not all applications of graphene require the same level of purity.

Significant advances in the production of graphene like this bring us closer to the first commercial versions of applications we’ve only seen in the lab so far, including faster circuits, more efficient solar cells, improved displays, and new kinds of chemical, medical, and industrial processes.