Scalable production of large quantities of defect-free few-layer graphene by shear exfoliation in liquids.

By K. Paton, Eswaraiah Varrla, C. Backes, Ronan J. Smith, U. Khan, A. O’Neill, Conor S. Boland, Mustafa Lotya, O. Istrate, P. King and 19 more. Nature Materials, 2014

2,169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To progress from the laboratory to commercial applications, it will be necessary to develop industrially scalable methods to produce large quantities of defect-free graphene. Here we show that high-shear mixing of graphite in suitable stabilizing liquids results in large-scale exfoliation to give dispersions of graphene nanosheets. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy show the exfoliated flakes to be unoxidized and free of basal-plane defects. We have developed a simple model that shows exfoliation to occur once the local shear rate exceeds 10(4) s(-1). By fully characterizing the scaling behaviour of the graphene production rate, we show that exfoliation can be achieved in liquid volumes from hundreds of millilitres up to hundreds of litres and beyond. The graphene produced by this method performs well in applications from composites to conductive coatings. This method can be applied to exfoliate BN, MoS2 and a range of other layered crystals.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7081388f372231e13080f129423f6605d0c5168f

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Citations in the corpus

Graphene, related two-dimensional crystals, and hybrid systems for energy conversion and storage (2015, background): “liquid-phase exfoliation (LPE)—for example, via ultrasonication (7, 17) or shearmixing (18).”
Mechanical properties of graphene and graphene-based nanocomposites (2017, background): “[45] who showed that high shear forces can be used rather than ultrasonic cavitation and thus exfoliated graphene on a 100 litre scale.”