Judy Martinez Physicists got graphene from pine
If you take a piece of wood and skillfully burn it with a laser, you get one of the most famous substances in this world.
For the manufacture of a valuable substance, scientists at Rice University used conventional industrial laser. A wood blank was placed in an oxygen-free atmosphere of argon or hydrogen at room temperature and pressure. Then the surface was burned with a laser beam. Subsequent study of the target showed that the heated upper layer with a thickness of about 500–800 µm turned into graphene. Surely there were some subtleties in the experiment, the details of which are unknown to us, but you can get acquainted with them in an article published in Advanced Materials…
In previous experiments, their authors, graduate students Ruquan Ye and Yieu Chyan, tried oak and birch wood as raw materials, but pine suited better. It’s about spatial orientation. lignin – a mixture of substances that plays one of the key roles in the construction of wood cell walls.
The idea of the experiment may seem trivial, but remember that the easiest way to obtain graphene involves the use of ordinary graphite, scotch tape and an ordinary mobile phone screen as a substrate.
The authors of the innovation believe that it can be used in the production of biodegradable electronics. And just trees, including pines, are an almost inexhaustible natural resource.
This is not the first example of the production of graphene using a laser. Prior to that, laser-induced graphene was obtained on the basis of polyimide – cheap plastic.
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