'Flash Graphene' Made from Trash Could Reduce Manufacturing Costs
Researchers from Rice University introduce an Earth-friendly method that can turn bulk amounts of almost any material containing carbon content into valuable graphene flakes. The “flash graphene” technique can convert a ton of coal, food waste, plastic waste, or wood clippings into graphene for a fraction of the cost used by other bulk graphene-producing methods. The graphene is made in 10 milliseconds by heating carbon-containing materials to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This technique can help facilitate an enormous reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials. “By strengthening concrete with graphene, we could use less concrete for building, and it would cost less to manufacture and less to transport,” adds Rice chemist James Tour.
Transcript
00:00:03 [Music] in the bottom of this cart there there are Bay's of capacitors that get charged up from the wall current charges up these capacitors then what happens is that is that goes through some electronics and then it goes to two electrodes and then when Dewey will push the button we have a high voltage across this and then a current will pass
00:00:30 through this with enough energy to break every carbon-carbon bond in the system and then when that breaks it's going to reconstruct as graphene so right now we have carbon black in there which is an amorphous carbon and you're going to see a bright flash when that takes place because most of the energy is going into not heat but but this blackbody radiation which is breaking every
00:00:55 carbon-carbon bond in there reconstructing and then the excess is coming out as a bright flash of light the count of three we're going to cause us to flash one two three the pioneers you hit up and when you cool it down you make graphene so that's why I've come up with the ideas of you doing something similar to laser induced graphene but we others different Carbon
00:01:24 sauce and use different sorts of energies which is electrics Cities previously we had taken a copper foil and we could grow graphene on that from many different carbon sources one of them for example being cookies Girl Scout cookies or from dead roaches but the problem with that is we could only make about a picogram of graphene a very very small amount of graphene that might
00:01:50 be suitable for electronics here we can do it in bulk this is a process that we call flash graphene because we can take essentially any carbon material and turn it into graphene domestic us coal the coal industry is just hurting so bad so can we take coal continue to mine it in large quantities but use that coal for a much higher value product so that we can put that coal into concrete we can put
00:02:18 that coal into building materials we can put that coal into paints into films into asphalt and now use that and keep that industry going just taking a very such inexpensive material that's like $100 a ton and convert that to a higher value material and then we only need a little bit of it to put it into all these different applications it's just enormous what we're going to be able to
00:02:41 do with this [Music] you