Create materials 200 times stronger than steel from cooking oil

A report in Science magazine reported that the price of a micrometer-sized graphene could reach $ 1,000. However, the development of technology has made the cost of graphene diminish.

A soybean cooking oil used in everyday life has been used by scientists to make graphene in the laboratory.

This advance in technology will greatly reduce the cost and complexity of making graphene on a commercial scale.

Graphene is made up of an extremely tightly bound layer of carbon molecules. Therefore it is very light, 200 times stronger than steel and better conductive than copper.

With such transcendent properties, the potential of graphene applications is huge, ranging from electronics to solar panels and medicine.

However, it is difficult and expensive to produce graphene on a large scale.

The fabrication of graphene requires complex manufacturing techniques such as creating high temperatures in a vacuum as well as expensive components such as high purity metals and explosive gases.

A piece of graphene is made from cooking oil.(Image source: CSIRO).

In a recently published study, a group of Australian scientists presented a method to help create graphene with inexpensive materials as well as in conventional air conditions.

To produce graphene, soybean oil is heated in a tube oven for about 30 minutes. They then decompose into carbon blocks and lump on the metal leaves made of nickel.

These clumps of carbon will quickly be cooled and thinly dispersed onto the surface of the metal foil into a rectangle of 5x2 cm in size and about 1 nanometer thick (80,000 thinner than a human hair).

Co-author of the study, Dr. Zhao Jun Han from the CSIRO Institute of Technology says this method will be faster and more energy-efficient than other methods.

Dr. Zhao said this process could cut the cost of producing graphene by ten times.

"The process of making graphene at this room temperature is very fast, simple, safe, capable of replication and high applicability ," said Zhao Jun Huan, a researcher involved in the project: "Technology Our uniqueness can reduce graphene production costs and improve the applicability of this material. "

"We can now recycle our cooking oil instead of leaving it and turning it into something useful," said Dong Han Seo, a researcher who joined the project.

The question is whether this new graphene manufacturing technique can be replicated. Although the Australian scientists' new technique is extremely wonderful, only one graphene sheet with a size of 5x2cm is created.

The researchers said the largest size of graphene sheets they ever made was as big as a credit card.

To really create graphene that can be used commercially, scientists need to create graphene sheets that are much larger than they are today. The team is currently looking for trading partners to pursue the goal of making large-scale graphene sheets.