Edible Electronics? Writing Graphene Patterns on Toast with Lasers
Rice University scientists who introduced laser-induced graphene have enhanced their technique to produce what may become a new class of edible electronics. The scientists are investigating ways to write graphene patterns onto food and other materials with a laser.
Transcript
00:00:01 [Music] been able to make graphene on many different substrates previously we could only make graphene on materials that that were like poly Emmet a particular type of polymer but now what we found is by tuning the laser a little bit differently and defocusing the laser which first carbon eise's the material and then we take the carbonized material
00:00:32 and convert it into graphene so what you see here is you don't see ink this is not ink this is not the addition of ink to a material this is taking the material itself the wood itself and converting it into graphene and the laser allows us to write it into any pattern that we wish this is on a piece of wood or we can do it even on foods like this is a potato to remember what
00:00:57 graphene is it's these single atomic thick sheets of graphite and now we take these and we put a few of them on top of each other as we convert the material itself a piece of bread and so you can convert the carbohydrates that are within bread to graphene or we can do it on a coconut so you can take a coconut and convert that into graphene now why would we want to have something like
00:01:25 this this is all conductive and so it can conduct electricity so what we can do now is we can make electronics embedded within fabrics and make electronics embedded within wood so right now we're going to be lazing a cardboard box here and the significance of being able to put electronic traces on cardboard boxes is that it has a lot of potential commercial significance in
00:01:49 being able to write RFID tags directly on boxes so you can either test a tell where it's been or you can put a sensor on the box and see what kind of conditions it's been exposed to currently people are using RFID tags that have been manufactured and they attach them to the boxes but being able to directly convert a box would be really valuable why would one want
00:02:09 edible electronics well first of all let me start with very often we don't see the advantage of something early on but when we make it available people start seeing the real advantage so can you even take have electronics embedded on food and then say use this as a heat circuit to heat the food more easily there say an RFID tag written onto this potato where has it been how long has it
00:02:36 been stored where did what what's its country of origin and it's city of origin and what path did it go to to get to your table all that can be embedded not on a separate tag that's placed on the food but directly on the food itself and these can also have sensors sensors that would detect ecoli sensors that would to detect microorganisms that you might not want they could immediately
00:03:01 light up and give you a signal that you don't want to eat this so being able to barcode food in a sense could have real advantages you