Graphene is a two-dimensional crystal formed by densely packed carbon atoms. It is the thinnest and hardest nanomaterial known so far. It has ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-flexible, ultra-high strength, super-strong conductivity, excellent Thermal conductivity and light transmittance and other properties, it combines good light transmittance, high thermal conductivity, high electron mobility, low resistivity, high mechanical strength and other excellent properties in one, in electronics, optics, magnetism, biomedicine, catalysis , energy storage, sensors and many other fields have broad and huge application potential. It is a super material that will dominate the future high-tech competition. It is known as “black gold” and “king of new materials”.
What Is Graphene?
Graphene is a two-dimensional carbon nanomaterial. It is a hexagonal honeycomb-shaped material composed of carbon atoms. It has excellent properties, which are reflected in optics, electricity, and mechanics. It plays a very important role in energy and medicine in our lives. It is known as an extremely thin but extremely hard material. Its color is close to transparent. It is also particularly resistant to high temperatures.
Graphene, known as the “king of new materials”, is very special in chemical structure. It is a two-dimensional carbon nanomaterial composed of carbon atoms with sp2 hybrid orbitals forming a hexagonal honeycomb lattice. Different from traditional materials, graphene has outstanding optical, electrical, and mechanical properties. It has excellent electrical conductivity, excellent mechanical properties, extremely high thermal conductivity, and excellent barrier properties. Display, lithium battery conductive paste, sensors and other high-tech manufacturing fields are widely used, and have become indispensable and important materials in the era of new technological revolution.
How Is Graphene Produced?
Generally, there are two preparation methods: top-down exfoliation method and bottom-up synthesis method. Top-down stripping approach. The top-down peeling method generally uses chemical methods to tear this kind of tearing. The bottom-up synthesis method, taking the more typical redox method as an example, requires 50 kg of concentrated sulfuric acid, 3 kg of potassium permanganate and 1 ton of water to prepare 1 kg of graphene. As you can imagine, a large amount of waste water will be generated when a large amount of graphene powder is prepared, which is a huge pressure on environmental protection.
How Thick Is Graphene?
Strictly speaking, only a graphite sheet with one atomic layer is called graphene. Usually, in terms of industrial practical application, our general consensus is that graphite sheets with less than 10 layers can be called graphene. After that, it is ordinary graphite material and graphite powder.
Graphene Applications
After years of technology accumulation and upgrading iterations in China, the intersection of graphene and chemistry, materials, physics, biology, environment, energy and many other disciplines has deepened. Coupled with the continuous optimization and improvement of the preparation process, the cost has gradually decreased. The application scenarios are becoming more and more extensive, especially in the emerging fields of micro-nano processing, energy, biomedicine, and medicine. It is known as a revolutionary material in the future and a technology-intensive cutting-edge new material.
In terms of integrated circuits, graphene has the ideal properties as an excellent integrated circuit electronic device: high carrier mobility and low noise. In 2011, IBM successfully created the first graphene-based integrated circuit-a broadband wireless mixer, the circuit processing frequency is up to 10 GHz, and its performance is not affected at temperatures up to 127°C. Graphene nanoribbons have the characteristics of high electrical conductivity, high thermal conductivity, and low noise. They are a choice of interconnect materials for integrated circuits and may replace copper metal.
In transistors, graphene has a high carrier mobility 10 times that of commercial silicon wafers, and is less affected by temperature and doping effects, exhibiting room temperature submicron-scale ballistic transport properties (up to 0.3 at 300 K m), which is the most prominent advantage of graphene as a nanoelectronic device, making possible room-temperature ballistic field-effect transistors that are very attractive in the field of electronic engineering.
