Manufacturing graphene …

… just got a little bit easier. This is good news out of Rice University. I written this many times, but there’s simply too much smoke in the graphene hype for there not to be a serious fire somewhere. I’m guessing some combination of display technology for handheld electronics is one of the best areas to monitor for market-ready graphene applications.

From the link:

Single-atom-thick sheets of carbon called graphene have some amazing properties: graphene is strong, highly electrically conductive, flexible, and transparent. This makes it a promising material to make flexible touch screens and superstrong structural materials. But creating these thin carbon sheets, and then building things out of them, is difficult to do outside the lab.

Now an advance in making and processing graphene in solution may make it practical to work with the material at manufacturing scale. Researchers at Rice University have made graphene solutions 10 times more concentrated than any before. They’ve used these solutions to make transparent, conductive sheets similar to the electrodes on displays, and they’re currently developing methods for spinning the graphene solutions to generate fibers and structural materials for airplanes and other vehicles that promise to be less expensive than today’s carbon fiber.

Making material: Sheets of graphene lay atop a mat of single-walled carbon nanotubes.
Credit: N. Behabtu/Rice University