Making Graphene Using the Shear-Exfoliation of Graphite Powder

As recently published in Nature a few weeks ago, Irish scientists have developed a new scalable method to create graphene using a high power mixer, graphite powder, water and surfactant. So I decided to "give it a whirl."

My attempt today yielded approximately 1L of some heavily concentrated, several-layer graphene suspension. I am going to use TGA tomorrow to determine the exact concentration, but I expect it to be greater than 500 mg per litre. Aside from being 4-7 layer graphene, I am happy with my results. I plan on making another batch tomorrow and filtering the graphene out and washing it several times and use it in conjunction with a modified Hummers' method or mild sonication to further reduce the number of layers.

Out of this batch I will be making conductive ink and graphene paper.

Here's what I used:

1L deionized distilled water
100 g graphite powder, ~325 mesh
50 mL Dawn Ultra dish detergent: 10-30% AES/AS, 3-7% C10-16 AO, 1-5% Ethanol

Mixed the ingredients with a 200W Braun stainless steel immersion hand blender having adequate turbidity for 30 min.

For more info read this article:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/04/graphene-made-kitchen-blender-shear-mixing


Видео Making Graphene Using the Shear-Exfoliation of Graphite Powder канала Jonathan Fosdick