Caltech's David Boyd has done what scientists have been struggling to do for years: He says he's figured out a cheap, easy way to make graphene, and to make a lot of it. The kicker? He's using technology from the 1960s.

Cooking up graphene

Graphene was a wonder material first theorized in 1947 and not actually proven in the real world until years later, when scientists did it in the strangest of ways in 2003: by rubbing a pencil across some Scotch tape. Made of sheets of carbon just one atom thick, the stuff is tough, durable, and conductible. It's the perfect material for not only super-conductors but also in all kinds of lightweight, high-strength futuristic materials. –solar panels, medical diagnostic devices, fuel cell extractors – ideas even as far-future as a tether for a space elevator.

So far, though, it's been enormously inefficient to make in mass quantities, especially in a high-quality form. The quality of graphene, Boyd says, is measured in centimeters squared per volt per second cm^2/(V s). The "exfoliated graphene method" first used to produce graphene in 2009 also created the highest quality graphene to date, at 200,000 cm^2/(V s). What it has in quality, though, this method lacks in quantity.

"You could stream out miles of graphene."

Then there's the chemical vapor deposition method, a common materials science trick. This involves heating a chamber of copper up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, exposing it to methane, and letting the graphene form on the surface. The graphene created this way measured only about 2,000 cm^2/(V s). This was low-quality stuff, in other words, partly owing to the imperfections in the copper. The process for CVD has since been refined to about 30,000cm^2/(V s), but over the course of nine hours and burning consistently at high temperatures. That's not terribly efficient.

A better way

Boyd et. al.

Boyd, a researcher in the Physics, Mathematics & Astronomy division at Caltech, says his method can burn at half the temperature and produce graphene with up to twice the quality of the second method. Oh, and do it all in five minutes. The research is outlined in Nature Communications.

His way uses only a small amount of methane gas, which splits into hydrogen and carbon when it reacts with the copper (a process Boyd smooths out by adding a nitrogen compound. At the same time, nitrogen added to the mix also reacts with the copper and smooths it surface, making it easier for high-quality graphene to form there. Heat is provided via plasma burning at about 420 degrees Celsius. At the end of the process there's a sheet of graphene left from the reaction with copper. In that way, Boyd's process is similar to the most advanced existing methods. But he says his product is 60,000 cm^2/(V s) and takes just a fraction of the time.

In other words: If this holds up, it's a game changer for graphene.

"You have a one-step chemistry," Boyd tells Popular Mechanics. "You remove the oxide, you smooth the copper, and you grow the graphene." The best part, Boyd says, is that because the technology has been around for more than half a century, it won't take much to scale up graphene production. Indeed, the next step is to try to pefect batch processing using Boyd's method, which could mean mass-produced graphene with which to build the future. "You could do it in a continuous fashion, where you could stream out miles of graphene," Boyd says.

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