007 Graphene - Making it And Using it

foreign is a two-dimensional form of graphite discovered in 2004 by another coven geim they got the Nobel Prize in 2010 and you would have thought it would take over the world and it was poised to do that there's a big question well why didn't it one of the major reasons it didn't because the early ways of making it were damn right dangerous they used 98 sulfuric acid and they used potassium permanganate which made an explosive compound will you do a little bit of that that's not a worry but if you did tons of that well you could just create a big pit the size of Massachusetts so it was a big worry for everybody and that was one of the things that was kind of holding it all back but of course research goes on and some really interesting ways have been found to create graphene now I'm really keen on people doing stuff at home and experimenting and discovering for themselves so having a look at what there is going and chosen two methods which I think well anybody could do graphene is the strongest material known to a man and when you get down to the level of the atom it looks like chicken wire layered out it's so strong that a tiny amount can significantly improve the properties of plastics paints Composites asphalt wood Composites concrete metals and all kinds of things it only has one slide problem and that is it's crazy expensive it's about two hundred thousand dollars a ton or something like that and the reason is it's difficult and dangerous to make it uses oh hideous chemicals things like 98 sulfuric acid not stuff you're going to want to be a handling and the product is disappointing it's not really graphene is often referred to as graphene but it's fuel layer graphene or it's pretty damaged or is pretty small so it's been disappointing until about 2013 when rice came out with something called flash graphene and Flash graphene was a method of taking graphene supposedly easily the setup is surprisingly simple it's a couple of brass rods stuck in a glass tube with the sample in between them and as you can see from the circuit diagram we have a power supply that charges up a capacitor bank and then we get a switch that allows that power to go through the tube and what you see is a very bright light in that bright flash is the release of the energy and what happens is the temperature is raised to about 3000 degrees Kelvin in about 10 milliseconds that kind of time means that the heat transfer can't go out of the sample it all stays in that sample because it's just too quick the first thing that happens is it carbonizes the next thing that happens is it reforms into graphene and true enough it's a marvelous operation but it does have some hidden things in there that make it very difficult to do at home and one of them is that little thing capacitor Bank on the circuit diagram we looked at that capacitor Bank actually consists of about 20 capacitors it's 0.22 farads capacitance at 400 volts so it's also lethal you might have noticed a danger sign it's also expensive for those individual capacitors themselves are quite expensive and to build a capacitor Bank probably costs somewhere around about three to four thousand pounds so I think think it's a little outside of what we could do easily at home although in Industry of course it could be done easily especially if you have the money to spend on capacitors but flashing graphene with electrical energy to capacitors isn't the only way to flash graphene you can also flash it with light and this is a 20 watt diode laser now you only need about 3.6 watts and the original work was done with the CO2 laser I've since been discovered that diode loads has worked just fine now it came about when Dr Kenner was looking at flash scribing graphene oxide and he was making capacitors out of that tour tried to replicate that and made a mistake and what he did was Flash this stuff kept on tape and he found that if you flash capped on tave then you've got two cans of graphene on there one was a spongy kind of graphene and if you changed this you got a rod kind of graphene because what you do is you do multiple passes it takes about three passes the first carbonizes the captain the secondary forms it in the third helps the graphene grow so passing this a number of times will make the graphene grow in a spongy form that is the light is focused if you defocus the light then every time you move a spot you are effectively multi-lacing an area and you get a needle-like growth by defocusing the light now when they discovered that Captain worked quite well of course it went on two other things and now they've discovered that you can actually scribe graphene onto a whole host of things including paper wood a range of plastic so in order to create a super capacitor flushing it with the laser then you need a laser that is between 405 and 450 nanometers which basically means every laser you're ever going to get because that means either a diode or CO2 either will work doesn't matter how powerful the laser is as long as at a minimum you can put 3 0.6 Watts Optical power out there which is pretty much every single lens that you're going to buy so it's really unrestrictive about what laser you're going to be able to use just about anything you can buy it's going to pretty much do the job and we use the cheap banggood laser which I think cost me about 145 pounds and it was uh a 5 watt laser and we got a beautiful result so anything is going to be able to do it all you do is you draw a drawing in your drawing package now the famous one is interdigitation which is basically fingers that interlock with each other draw that up in your drawing package and you're going to learn something now the first thing that was layers was this stuff kept on tape capped on tape is dead easy to use produces a brilliant result and that's why I talked about it but of course people now they've discovered you can layers graphene I've been doing all kinds of things the tour group have done coconuts and potatoes then you find a lot of people doing oh well pepper and wood all sorts of stuff paper is extremely interesting to me but of course could you get a bit of paper in your legs it all on happiness it'll burn so you need to do something to the pepper to prevent it burning and what you do is soak it in a fire retardant the easiest fire retardant to use is probably borax so sodium tetraborate silky paper and sodium tetraborate dry it then the next day it's ready to layers you lays it by drawing an interdigitated pattern in your laser program loading it up sticking the thing underneath the laser and turning the laser on [Music] oh [Music] [Music] okay that's what came out of the laser actually I think that's really quite impressive it's got a real graphic look to it but that actually has formed a graphene it's a spongy graphene because we've got an explosion in there but you can see it looks really graphic and now we need to test that as a super capacitor but that laser has done an awesome job okay so I've got it on this capacitance meter which is a rigold dm3058 it's a pretty decent meter all I've done is connect a couple of aluminum strips onto it so it can make good contact and all by itself without electrolyte it's around about a nano farad 1.078 nanofarads now um that doesn't sound like a lot but when you consider what it is actually that's really quite impressive because um something that was physically this size but two plates of aluminum will be around about 35 picofarads so it's a lot more maybe about a hundred times more or something like that or ballpark figures but really very much more than it would be just as a plate capacitor because that's to do with the surface area of the graphene I haven't added any electrical items I'm gonna put a bit of tissue paper on it and a little bit of electrolyte and we're going to measure the capacitance of that so we bang a bit of electrolyte on it and we get 6.5 microfarads now again that might not sound a lot in microfarads but remember it's supposed to be picofarads without electrolytes in the sort of Nano farads with the electrolyte we're getting micro farads for that tiny piece of material now obviously there's a fair bit of playing around to it but that is really quite a cool result okay it really is that simple all you need is a desktop laser and some of this stuff and you're away I mean obviously there's a lot can be done with it you could try different patterns you can stack them up you can see how it works on a whole field you can drag different electrolytes it's just such a ton of stuff you could do with it to create your own storage devices for well the trouble of doing it really and that's one of the things I like about it so much is it opens a possibility for experimentation and building to anybody and everybody which makes it brilliant as far as I'm concerned so as a dry method flashing it it's awesome I mean there's no waste materials there's no chemicals there's no disposal it does have his issues that is you only produce what you want to produce and it's already in a structure sometimes you would want basically a bucket load of it because you might want to do other things and that really means a wet method now wet methods can be pretty scary but not this one so the average price of graphene these days is in the region of 200 000 a ton or so and that seems like a lot of money particularly when you think about the average price of graphite which is in the region of 150 to 350 a ton so there's a big price difference between the two and it seems quite attractive but when you think about it a little bit then a ton remember is a thousand kilos and I've got about half a kilo of graphene right there so that's only about a hundred dollars and when you use it of course you don't use that much so it's one of the big reasons why making your own graphene has fallen by the wear side because making your own graphene in small amounts well it requires some pretty difficult and dangerous and expensive chemicals and then of course if you're socially conscious you have to disperse of all the waste properly so it can get more expensive to make it than it is to buy it which is a curious thing I actually still make my own however if there were a simple method of making it that was easier and cheaper clearly it would be so much cheaper to make and of course there is one so what Gein did at the beginning when he put a bit of sellotape on a lump of graphite and filled it apart and apart so the issue isn't making the graphene it's making lots of the graphene now Nvidia 1932 we looked at a methodology for making graphene in layers at attached to a background now that's really really useful for certain applications you know things like factories super capacitors heat pads um speakers that sort of thing brilliant because it comes already made for you to do something with it you don't have to do things like clean it and mix it with the glue and stick it on it's all just ready to use and of course it would be nice if there was a way to make a volume like that there was also cheap simple and effective and easy to use because in things like oh the epoxy resins maybe like uh what's his first stage Tech ingredients uh concrete you could use it in maybe put it on the Plastics that sort of thing so a bulk method that was simple and straightforward would be absolutely brilliant that's where this comes in now the channel used to be about graphene and I had a look through and counted the graphene videos at something like 198 graphene videos on how to make it and use it so of course there are systems where we can actually do that and perhaps one of the easiest ones was this this is clearly a kitchen blender and it was Trinity College Dublin who came up with this one because if you think about how gaim did it he was shearing off the graphene platelets from the graphite lump and this thing of course right there has a Shear so we stick some graphite in there thread some water and turn it on then it should shear and it does it creates shear and turbulence the only problem is the graphene as it peels off once it got stripped back on again and so you need to put something in there to help it peel off and to prevent it sticking back on and what Trinity College Dublin did was use this stuff washing up liquid and we did a couple of video videos on this method actually and it does indeed produce high quality graphene that is easy to use if you want it in a liquid form because getting it out and cleaning it was a bit of a nightmare however research never stops does it and this is from a paper called kitchen chemistry 101 and I'll put a link to that in the description below so anybody who wants to read up on this can read off on it and they were worried about the same kind of things that is making a graphene that was easy to get out into a powder form that wouldn't require a huge amount of washing or a huge amount of disposal cost and they looked at three things blood milk and eggs turns out that the proteins in these materials will act in the same way as the dishwasher soap with the huge exception of their easy to get rid of the proteins in these things are things like bovine bovine serum albumin lactoglobulins that's what you find in milk and these you'll find the lysosome and um of albumin and that's in the egg white and in blood do you find hemoglobin they practiced on these things and they found naturally that the blood although it worked wasn't brilliant so I did think about going down to the Avatar and getting your pint of blood or even you know I suffer from my art some of my own blood but I decided in the end not to so blood and eggs work just not brilliantly the best thing that works is bovine serum albumin and lactoglobulins now in milk we've got three main proteins as well as lots of sugar and lots of water we've got the lactoglobulins we've got the serum albumin and we've got casein which is the stuff you find in cheese so if you get some milk that has had the casein removed what you're left with are the two main proteins were actually after and of course there is a product where they remove the casing and it's this stuff whey powder this particular bag of wear powder is chocolate flavored but out of 100 grams of this 71 grams of it is the proteins that we're looking for now in the research paper what they found was it was astonishing how LAX you could be about this I mean sure enough there were parameters in which it performed better but it would work with a huge range of parameters down from next to nothing to 100 grams of this per liter down from 20 grams to 100 grams per liter of graphite so it's just this massive range of what would work by sticking it in a kitchen blender to give you high concentrations of graphene water because a high concentration of graphene in water is something like three to four milligrams per milliliter it's not a huge amount they're again seven or eight milligrams per milliliter which is fast and they were getting it in half an hour okay so there really was just such a huge range that they used and all of them worked so if you read the paper you'll find out so we don't need to be that precise about this so I'm going to add 500 milliliters of deionized water in there and 50 grams of my graphite now the graphite I'm using is this stuff this stuff's actually really rather beautiful it's about 150 microns across they're used anywhere between 45 to 250 microns so again the graphic platelet size isn't that important however the bigger the plate is and the bigger your graphene sheets are and the more conductive it is so I've used quite a large graphite then you're going to find it works really quite well and again anywhere between sort of five grams and 50 grams is gonna work in that 500 milliliters of water then we add our proteins now this remember is bovine serum albumin and lactoglobulin and we need about one and a half grams of protein in there for what we've added so I'm just going to put a teaspoon in and again it really doesn't matter the kind of numbers that we use it is kitchen chemistry par Excellence close that up and we'll give that a blitz okay we need to Blitz it for about half an hour and after half an hour turn it off now we'll be foamy because we've put some stuff in there what we need to do is leave it to separate and to de-gas so the gas will just come out of the foam the heavier particles of graphite are going to sink to the bottom and we're going to get a black layer in between which is the graphene subscript off some of the foam and there it is it's kind of a blue black color apparently it's stable in suspension for about two months if you want to separate it out you need to centrifuge it at 45 minutes at 1500 RPM now the proteins which now coat the graphene prevent it from re-stacking so you'll get a dry powder that way if you're going to use this I wouldn't bother I mean it's already really nicely dispersed just Chuck that in some sand and cement and you're going to have yourself a graphene improved concrete to prove that it's graphite a graphene well you really need a Ramen for that and you're looking for the G and D band so I'm going by what the paper said the paper said it's graphene and I have no reason to disbelieve them but there we go a tub full of graphene made from Wow Blood Sweat and Tears no no blood Acres of milk and milk is the best in the kitchen blend it for half an hour don't think you're gonna get a better easier method for a little while yet so it's a bit of a revelation if you think about it because you can make graphene from a kitchen blender water graphite and blood if you really want to milk or eggs turns out milk works the best but I suppose if you're a vampire and you want graphene blood is going to be your option and we've got two choices here we can either leave this as is and put it into something or we can dry it now drying it's really easy you just spin it up in a centrifuge at 1500 RPM for 45 minutes set it out to dry and what you'll get is a whole bunch of this stuff which is graphene powder because there's graphene powder we then want to do something with it now Tech ingredients mixed this with an epoxy resin but since it's a bio-compatible I thought I would mix it with the bio based plastic the earliest bio-based plastic we know of is casein casein is really easy to make at home but it's one of those kids experiments where you take some milk and here's how you make it [Music] foreign [Music] powder and this is just powdered casing now what we do to that is ADD 0.5 percent of graphene powder to it you really don't need to add a lot to get an enhancement and we only added a 0.5 because it was completely random we just chose something and it turns it into this silvery powder what we do with that is put it into a mold so a mold is really simple it's just a press and a bit of Steel you pour the powder into there and heat it to 135 degrees centigrade and then put about 20 tons on it which is what this press is when you've done that you can take it out of the mold and there is our piece of plastic now this is incredibly strong let's give it a go a stabbing it and see how it holds up I've been approached to see if it's usable for stab proofing we're quite confident it is so what I was going to do I'm going to use this brand new pristine piece um but we've been having a go at this and I'll show you the results in a minute but we're going to be using and I've cut that we've got and we've hit this sort of 30 40 times so far I mean if you're unlucky enough to live in a world where you need step proofing that's bad enough if you're even more unlucky and you need protection against about 30 stab rooms then that's even better so what I'll do I'll get this down on the floor we've got a solid concrete floor behind this and I'll give it a go with a sharpened this is sometimes used as a weapon actually sharpened um screwdriver so I'm 16 and a half Stone fairly big guy so I'm going to bring this down as hard as I can and we'll see how it performs [Music] go get it Mike go for it now you might have guessed from the footage we did all about some time ago about seven years I think and we actually sent it for a testing unit turns out that volume for volume is about twice as strong as steel wait for weight it's about 10 times as strong and we also took it to a firing range and here's a bit we've got left now um we fired a nine millimeter at it and the three millimeter thick plate of this would stop a nine millimeter bullet so now everybody knows if you put graphene into concrete you're going to improve the strength of the concrete but graphene concrete has two intrinsic problems the first one is getting it to disperse properly do you add two Pounders together mixing them up so you get proper dispersion is in fact quite challenging the second one is it's really expensive so you need to make it cheaply now I haven't bothered doing anything with this because of course what we've already got is a graphene dispersion in water if all we do is put that into our dry cement then we'll be able to disperse the graphene super super easily because it's already dispersed and of course we already know that making this stuff is unbelievably cheap and that's about seven milligrams per milliliter as a concentration so what we plan on doing is pouring that straight into the concrete because of course that saves us a huge amount of trouble and effort because we don't want to dry it and all the processes involved with getting it out to have to re-mix it and all the processes involved in mixing it properly when it's already there now when you make concrete blocks for testing they're actually standard sizes they're four inches by four inches by four inches or six inches by six inches by six inches and you make them in steel molds once you've made those in steel molding you've got your concrete block you can take that down to the test house and have it tested and we did exactly that so here it is in a test machine so the load is now being applied to the topic okay [Music] just adds the um that's the weight and the pressure over a constant yeah so you know the cube concrete deforms it's it's slightly plastic as many things are yeah I don't expect it to be but it is um and so as um as it's deforming the load is kind of catching up with it okay so it's always a constant load based on what it's measuring okay now concrete isn't the same Beast world over it has different properties different strengths obviously different costs and it depends on the cement it's made from now there are five most popular ones that are used in just about every circumstance and here are the results of graphene added concrete and all the other five concretes it may not be immediately obvious but that last one marked fwg cwm is the graphene added concrete that we made and it is 58 stronger than any other concrete now you might have noticed it said seven day test and that's because there are two tests there's a seven day test where you leave it a cure for seven days and then a 28 day test where it's been cured for 28 days because concrete gets stronger over time as it cures from the first time it dries to when it's finally ready and cured so it gets stronger over time now ours is is stronger than every other seven day test what's more is the seven day keyword concrete is stronger than everybody else's 28-day keyword concrete so this method at First Sight doesn't seem like much but when you look at it a little bit deeper it suddenly becomes really really exciting because of course this method is dirt cheap really simple remains in dispersion so you can afford to just Chuck it in your concrete and it increases the strength of the concrete by 58 what that means is you can use a third less concrete and everything and a third less concrete is a huge amount of concrete when you think of all the concrete that's being used and concrete is recognized as one of the biggest contributors so we can reduce the amount of contribution by one whole third that's incredible when you think about it anyway then this is graphene powder there's a very special graphene powder actually because it's coated in protein molecules and what that does is keep everything apart and stops the graphene going back to graphite it also means that it's easier to break up and it's easier to put into other things but you can't just put this into something and stir it with a stick because the real problem is dispersion that is getting it mixed properly and that's quite challenging now we want to put this into plastic we need to use a process called Master batching Master batching is a complicated process because it's so difficult to break everything up properly to get proper dispersion and companies go to a lot of trouble when it comes to master batching they're pour in the Virgin plastic they pour in the color or other additives give it a jolly good stir before the extruder into pellet form when you've done that then you can get a good plastic with a good dispersion if we're looking for improvement in strength of course we need that graphene to be well dispersed throughout the plastic now we can't really do that without some expensive Machinery so we sent this off to a Master Batcher and then we had extruded into standard dog bones for testing add graphene into anything and it makes it stronger so what we have here is the graphene Peak which we actually sent to the University of Limerick in Ireland and they tested this for us and they in their own words it was unbreakable and what they actually meant was their machines failed before our plastic did okay so what we have here is the graphy peak in a dog bone so we put a nice little hook on here and a sling it's just a little bit of plastic yeah man that's awesome yeah good okay okay [Applause] [Laughter] awesome oh wow wow I take two uh the actual strap broke so uh we've actually had to reinforce the strap but uh my 17 Stone hopefully won't break wow that is awesome [Music] oh man it broke it again it broke well I'm cold stone okay right can we actually need the screw fell this time the screws that's me that's awesome look at that that's actually stronger than that steel [Laughter] oh my God yeah that's that's astonishing stuff yeah anyway the point of the shenanigans well you mix the graphene in properly to a plastic and the properties are truly astounding and we have had this stuff tested so we do have some test figures but there's nothing like getting a feel for it by swinging on it and not having it break everything else breaks around it so graphene the Wonder material of our age has been to my mind underused and I think that's because until now it's been difficult dangerous and expensive but hopefully what we've seen is that there are at least two methods though where it can be produced easily and in bulk so I hope we've seen that it's actually easy to produce than you think it goes in a huge range of materials and we've had a look at some of those ways of putting that together and the properties it gives materials are are truly astounding anyway I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and please do remember to like And subscribe

Channel: TNT Omnibus

Views: 11,250

Keywords: science, comedy, banter, lab, workshop, laboratory, diy, d-i-y, technology, tech, howto, chemistry, physics, electronics, graphene, synthesis

Id: iqOCtEsMWjs

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023