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They're the building block of graphite ultra-thin sheets of carbon, just one atom thick, whose discovery was lauded in 2010 with a Nobel Prize in Physics.
The seemingly simple material is graphene, and many researchers believe it has great potential for many applications, from electronic devices to high-performance composite materials.
Graphene is extremely strong, an excellent conductor, and with no internal structure at all, it offers an abundance of surface area much like a sheet of paper.
When it comes to producing and utilizing graphene on a large scale, however, researchers have come upon a major problem: the material's tendency to aggregate. Like paper, graphene sheets easily stack into piles, thus greatly reducing their surface area and making them unprocessable.
Researchers at Northwestern University have now developed a new form of graphene that does not stack. The new material inspired by a trash can full of crumpled-up papers is made by crumpling the graphene sheets into balls.
A paper describing the findings, "Compression and Aggregation-resistant Particles of Crumpled Soft Sheets," was published October 13 in the journal ACS Nano.
Graphene-based materials are very easily aggregated due to the strong interaction between the sheets, called "Van der Waals attraction." Therefore, common steps in materials processing, such as heating, solvent washing, compression, and mixing with other materials, can greatly affect how the sheets are stacked. When the paper-like sheets band together picture a deck of cards their surface area is lost; with just a fraction of its original surface area available, the material becomes less effective. Stacked graphene sheets also become rigid and lose their processability.
Some scientists have tried to physically keep the sheets apart by inserting non-carbon "spacers" between them, but that changes the chemical composition of the material. When graphe
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| Contact: Megan Fellman fellman@northwestern.edu 847-491-3115 Northwestern University Source:Eurekalert |
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