Chennai

Graphene is considered as one of the strongest materials known and in addition, it conducts electricity thirteen times better than copper. The researchers have found that when graphite is suspended in an appropriate fluid and subjected to an intense shearing force of machining, the layers of graphite separate into graphene platelets.

Dr Sathyan Subbiah, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras, who led the research team, said, superior quality graphene is commonly prepared using the peeling off method. Subbiah pointed out that the graphite is a lubricant because it is made of layers of carbon that slide over one another.

Stating that the Nobel-winning work at Manchester involved peeling off layers of graphene from graphite using scotch tape, he said that since then laboratories all over the world have been developing various forms of chemical and mechanical methods to produce graphene.

Accordingly, the IIT researchers suspended graphite in a lubricant liquid containing sodium cholate to prevent the graphite particles from clumping together and subjected the suspension to the machining of mild steel using oscillations of a carbide tool.

As Subbiah had expected, the oscillations trapped the graphite to produce graphene flakes as a byproduct of the lubricant with thicknesses in the range of a few nanometers - a nanometre being one billionth of a metre; to put this in perspective, a single human hair is about 60,000 nanometres in diameter.

Claiming that Graphene is considered the super material of the century, he said, it is one of the strongest materials and has an extremely high surface area -- six grams of graphene could cover an entire soccer field, a property that makes it extremely useful in applications like chemical analysis.

However, the IIT Madras team’s experiments showed that increasing the time of machining induces defects and disorders in the layers. “We are now focusing on controlling the stresses and machining parameters to produce defect-free layer graphene,” said Subbiah on future directions of his team’s research.

Visit news.dtnext.in to explore our interactive epaper!

Download the DT Next app for more exciting features!

Click here for iOS

Click here for Android