Keri Recipe for Making Graphene

Keri researchers placed graphite and frozen carbon dioxide in a ball miller, which is a canister filled with stainless steel balls. The canister was turned for two days and the mechanical force produced flakes of graphite with edges essentially opened up to chemical interaction by carboxylic acid formed during the milling.

 The carboxylated edges make the graphite soluble in a class of solvents called protic solvents, which include water and methanol, and another class called polar aprotic solvents, which includes dimethyl sulfoxide.

 Once dispersed in a solvent, the flakes separate into graphene nanonsheets of five or fewer layers.

 To form large-area graphene nanosheet films, a solution of solvent and the edge-carboxylated graphene nanosheets was cast on silicon wafers 3.5 centimeters by 5 centimeters, and heated to 900 degrees Celsius. Again, the heat decarboxylated the edges, which then bonded with edges of neighboring pieces. The researchers say this process is limited only by the size of the wafer. The electrical conductivity of the resultant large-area films, even at a high optical transmittance, was still much higher than that of their counterparts from the acid oxidation.

 By using ammonia or sulfur trioxide as substitutes for dry ice and by using different solvents, "you can customize the edges for different applications," Baek said. "You can customize for electronics, supercapacitors, metal-free catalysts to replace platinum in fuel cells. You can customize the edges to assemble in two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures."