BRITE Relaunch: A Liquid Phase Process for Graphene Manufacturing

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Remarkable materials can be engineered from carbon. Fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and most recently graphene have garnered huge interest due to their special chemical, optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties. Whether it is protecting metals from corrosion or enabling the next generation of lightweight and strong plastics, these new carbon materials are poised to enable a greener and more sustainable society.

To fully exploit these systems requires transformative approaches to their manufacturing. The highly inefficient and energy consuming techniques used by researchers to make these special carbons, while adequate for the laboratory, are poorly suited to the large scale and sustainable production needed to translate them to widespread commercial use. This Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) Relaunch award capitalizes on a recent discovery that will support the manufacturing of graphene at relatively low temperatures, and it will apply this advanced manufacturing technique in order to form intricately shaped magnetic polymers as well as porous carbon sponges.

Such sponges are excellent bulk materials for removing waste materials from contaminated water. This effort will offer an alternative manufacturing route to the rapidly expanding graphene industry and provide intensive research training for graduate students and undergraduates alike, with efforts aimed at increasing the retention of STEM undergraduates in engineering.

It also supports the development of sustainable materials education for engineers, providing a quantitative framework for assessing the overall impact of a manufacturing process.

The research goals in this work center on the development and optimization of a liquid phase process for forming carbon materials. This project tackles this challenge by forming carbon materials directly in a liquid phase process, much like processes used to make specialty polymers. The method exploits the recent discovery that a fine powder of iron oxide can catalyze formation of carbon nanomaterials.

By instrumenting the reaction process, real-time information will result in the efficient formation of materials with tailored formats and properties. Control algorithms will be developed for optimized manufacturing using this real-time information. This will also create new knowledge about how graphene forms within a solution environment.

Graphene formation will first occur on nanoparticles, followed by porous structures and 2D graphene sheets. The magnetic carbons formed will also be blended with polymers in an additive manufacturing approach using three-dimensional printing to form shaped permanent magnets. Other formats of these carbons, such as porous sponges and thin films, will be applied to problems in water treatment and transparent electronics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.