Vorbeck says it can produce graphene cheaply and abundantly
These days the big buzz in materials science is graphene. Kenneth Chang reported in the New York Times science section a few weeks ago that more than 100 papers about graphene were presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Physical Society meeting.
Chang’s article focused on the fascinating physics behind graphene. “The hype is bigger,” Carlo Beenakker, a professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University, told Chang, “because the physics is richer.”
The commercial applications of graphene are just as exciting, entrepreneur John Lettow tells EQN. Lettow is part of a joint venture with Ilhan Aksay and Bob Prud’homme, both professors of chemical engineering at Princeton.
“It’s terrific that top-flight physicists are pursuing this,” said Lettow. “But graphene is not just an academic exercise. It will have a big, immediate commercial impact.” According to Lettow, who graduated from Princeton Engineering in 1995 and did his senior thesis with Aksay, their company, Vorbeck Materials Corp., is the only company to be commercially producing graphene.
Lettow says that graphene is likely to eclipse carbon nanotubes, one of the hottest areas of nanotechnology. Graphene promises many of the same exciting applications as carbon nanotubes, which are costly and difficult to manufacture. “The real breakthrough is that Ilhan and Bob have found a way to produce graphene cheaply,” Lettow said.
Graphite, the most stable form of carbon on Earth, consists of many layers of graphene. Through a chemical process, Aksay and Prud’homme explode graphite into ultrathin individual sheets of graphene. The image above, captured by postdoctoral researcher Hannes Schniepp with an atomic force microscope, shows about 20 sheets of graphene. Each sheet is only a couple of nanometers high and 200 to 500 nanometers wide (to put this in perspective, the average human hair is about 40,000 nanometers wide).
Aksay and Prud’homme have collaborated in their graphene work with Princeton professor of chemistry Roberto Car, Princeton associate research scholar Je-Luen Li, and Konstantin Kudin, an associate research scholar at the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. Delve further into the basic science behind their work in this Nature news article or this Physical Review Letters paper, for which Je-Luen Li was the lead author.
For more on the industrial potential of graphene, see this hot-off-the-presses issue of Plastics Technology. Aksay’s work with nature-inspired materials is mentioned in this Technology Review article. And you can look into one of Prud’homme’s many other research endeavors here.
AFM image: Hannes Schniepp
Related
About this blog
EQN is a blog from Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science that highlights faculty, students and alumni who, through innovation and leadership, are changing the world.
Recent Entries
- Starshade deploys for first time
- Hale ’11 and Ohlendorf ’05 shine in the major leagues
- Flood risk study receives $2.3 million Rockefeller Foundation grant
- Ice cream social August 9 to feature vintage technology
- Jennifer Rexford ’91 one of top 10 ‘cloud trailblazers’
- Dan Boneh *96 wins prize for advances in cryptography
- Computer science researchers untangle a hairy problem
- Technology Review: mining cellphone data without violating privacy
- Dean H. Vincent Poor elected fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh
- Bob Kahn wins Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Email EQN
Monthly Archives
- September 2013 (3)
- July 2013 (1)
- June 2013 (2)
- May 2013 (2)
- March 2013 (5)
- February 2013 (2)
- January 2013 (5)
- November 2012 (5)
- October 2012 (3)
- September 2012 (4)
- July 2012 (4)
- June 2012 (8)
- May 2012 (1)
- April 2012 (3)
- March 2012 (4)
- February 2012 (3)
- January 2012 (4)
- December 2011 (3)
- November 2011 (2)
- October 2011 (3)
- September 2011 (6)
- August 2011 (6)
- July 2011 (9)
- June 2011 (9)
- May 2011 (4)
- April 2011 (10)
- March 2011 (2)
- February 2011 (2)
- January 2011 (1)
- November 2010 (3)
- October 2010 (5)
- September 2010 (7)
- August 2010 (1)
- June 2010 (3)
- May 2010 (3)
- March 2010 (5)
- February 2010 (3)
- January 2010 (3)
- December 2009 (5)
- November 2009 (8)
- October 2009 (4)
- August 2009 (2)
- July 2009 (3)
- June 2009 (9)
- May 2009 (2)
- April 2009 (4)
- March 2009 (1)
- February 2009 (2)
- January 2009 (1)
- December 2008 (1)
- November 2008 (5)
- August 2008 (1)
- July 2008 (2)
- June 2008 (2)
- May 2008 (5)
- March 2008 (2)
- January 2008 (1)
- December 2007 (2)
- November 2007 (1)
- October 2007 (3)
- September 2007 (2)
- July 2007 (9)
- June 2007 (5)
- May 2007 (8)
- April 2007 (5)
- March 2007 (4)
- February 2007 (11)
- January 2007 (13)
- December 2006 (4)
- July 2006 (2)