MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.
The team’s results are the first demonstration of an industrial, scalable method for manufacturing high-quality graphene that is tailored for use in membranes that filter a variety of molecules, including salts, larger ions, proteins, or nanoparticles.
Such membranes should be useful for desalination, biological separation, and other applications.
For many researchers, graphene is ideal for use in filtration membranes. A single sheet of graphene resembles atomically thin chicken wire and is composed of carbon atoms joined in a pattern that makes the material extremely tough and impervious to even the smallest atom, helium.
Graphene-based membranes have mostly been made in small batches in the laboratory, where researchers can carefully control the material’s growth conditions.
If graphene membranes are ever to be used commercially they will have to be produced in large quantities, at high rates, and with reliable performance.
The researchers set out to build an end-to-end, start-to-finish manufacturing process to make membrane-quality graphene.
News Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/manufacturing-graphene-rolls-ultrathin-membranes-0418
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