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MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.
The team's results are the first demonstration of an industrial, scalable method for manufacturing high-quality graphene that is tailored for use in membranes that filter a variety of molecules, including salts, larger ions, proteins, or nanoparticles. Such membranes should be useful for desalination, biological separation, and other applications.
[...] For many researchers, graphene is ideal for use in filtration membranes. A single sheet of graphene resembles atomically thin chicken wire and is composed of carbon atoms joined in a pattern that makes the material extremely tough and impervious to even the smallest atom, helium.
Researchers, including Karnik's group, have developed techniques to fabricate graphene membranes and precisely riddle them with tiny holes, or nanopores, the size of which can be tailored to filter out specific molecules. For the most part, scientists synthesize graphene through a process called chemical vapor deposition, in which they first heat a sample of copper foil and then deposit onto it a combination of carbon and other gases.
Graphene-based membranes have mostly been made in small batches in the laboratory, where researchers can carefully control the material's growth conditions. However, Hart and his colleagues believe that if graphene membranes are ever to be used commercially they will have to be produced in large quantities, at high rates, and with reliable performance.
[...] The researchers set out to build an end-to-end, start-to-finish manufacturing process to make membrane-quality graphene.
The team's setup combines a roll-to-roll approach — a common industrial approach for continuous processing of thin foils — with the common graphene-fabrication technique of chemical vapor deposition, to manufacture high-quality graphene in large quantities and at a high rate.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/2018/manufacturing-graphene-rolls-ultrathin-membranes-0418
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 20 2018, @07:00PM
Unless there's some way of knitting, weaving, or welding together strips of graphene then this can only have limited applications. I can see that it could be extended to making strips that are quite lengthy, but the width, IIRC (see today's Next Big Future https://www.nextbigfuture.com/ [nextbigfuture.com] ) is less than 1 cm. That's great for linear purposes, but not for covering areas. So this could be tapes for strengthening compression containers, etc. They talk about using it in filters, but that would definitely limit the shapes that those filters could be. I didn't see mention of whether this form of graphene is a conductor or an insulator, but either would seem to have uses, though probably not sufficient to justify the cost of the material...unless you needed it for other reasons.
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