MIT researchers may have found a way to fix a major problem with the miracle material graphene. This material, which has been wowing tech enthusiasts lately, has constantly been riddled by the problem that it cannot be mass produced. That issue may now be solves, says MIT investigators.
In their MIT labs, the researchers announced earlier this week they may have found a new technique that aids the creation of graphene in big, continuous sheets. The solution seems to have been found via laboratory testing done by the team at the private university.
The process, while it is not entirely new for being used on graphene, has a unique variation put on it. Rather than the graphene being placed on a substrate in a vacuum chamber, as per the traditional method, the new technique deposits the graphene via a metal slide inside two hot concentric tubes. These tubes are at a temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius.
The advantage of this new method is that researchers now have a scalable form of graphene in the continuous sheet, and that size is not limited by the dimensions of the concentric tubes. Also, as the process is continuous, there is not the need to start and stop it to gather materials within the deposition chamber. As a result, the amount of graphene manufactured is more than with the previous method.
In terms of the quality of graphene produced, it depends on the speed of the process. The graphene is uniform and of a higher quality when the ribbons move at 25 millimeters per minute while that quality decreases if the speed is doubled.
With advances in graphene production, as MIT researchers have found, there is hope growing for the debut commercial versions of applications that have yet to leave the lab environment. Applications include more effective solar panels and quicker processes when, one day, microprocessors are built on graphene.