Graphene: How easy is it to make?

welcome today we're going to make graphene what's graphene you might ask well think of a pencil inside there's graphite now separate this graphite from the pencil and squish it down until you have a flat one atom thick sheet of graphite that is called graphene because of its molecular arrangement it demonstrates some very special qualities like its low electrical resistance well you see there are many questionable videos all over YouTube claiming to know the magical secret to manufacturing graphene no one in the right mind would want to try these but you know we're definitely going to try these so if you're seeing this video right now this probably didn't happen all right so before the experiment let's gather some control data to compare our results to so first we have a point 9-millimeter stick of lead and as we read the multimeter let's get around a median of 18 point 5 ohms now we're going to get a HP number 2 pencil right here and now with the power video magic I will sharpen it in a fraction of a second okay so let's try to get this little thing up okay scheisse again oh okay this is the one alright okay so you can immediately see that the resistance of those pencils actually a lot higher than the thin little piece of let let's say that the resistance is around thirty three point four oh here we have water Oh point nine millimeter piece of lead 9-volt battery two containers a stirrer spoon and some bath salts begin with a bath salts I put a spoon into the beaker and now I'm mixing it mixing it all up but until all of it dissolves mix mix mix mix mix mix mix just keep on mixing that looks pretty good nice alright I'm happy with that put all this aside and let's transfer it to the smaller little container this is a bottom of a water bottle cut off nice looks good here we have a 9-volt battery some tape and our graphite these two Graphite's are going to be electrodes we're going to prepare this with tape simply just going to tape two pieces of graphite to each of the terminals to the battery and we're going to make sure these two electrodes don't contact each other there's a fair distance between them nice and good perfect and now we just need to put it into the water boom there you go come on there we go see once you put these two little graphite nodes into the water they complete an electrical circuit as you can see bubbles are forming signaling that some sort of chemical change is occurring just look at that don't you notice all the little flakes of graphite coming off the lid so basically what's happening here is called electro chemical exfoliation two hours later on the surface of the solution you can see flakes of what is hopefully graphene it's very difficult to test these considering the fact I have no instruments which let me measure to the position of atoms but hopefully we'll be able to find the electrical resistance of these pieces and maybe they'll be similar to that of real graphene so we're just going to skim the little flakes of graphene off the surface using tape one little bubble came along with that one that's interesting okay so this is all of our yield now I'm going to go through it and test each little little piece of graphene hoping that we get a proper connection so as a little disappointed with the first sample because I'm getting no electrical connection hopefully not all of them are like this eat with all of these no conductivity even the tape there's just no electrical connection between the two probes huh that's very interesting we're trying to make a super material that has an extremely low electrical resistance but we seem to have made a useless material that has an extremely high electrical resistance maybe even no electrical resistance at all because it can't even conduct electricity that's really disappointing there's got to be at least one little part of it that conducts so what did we learn our initial graphite reactants showed us fairly promising results the thickest sample of graphite had the highest electrical resistance and then as we move down to the smaller sized piece of graphite the resistance went down this leads us to assume that if we are in fact successful making this thin graphite sheet even if it wasn't one atom thick its electrical resistance would be a lot lower than you know two samples a graphite sheet similar to the one I tried reproducing costs around 325 bucks it's done by a professional just imagine if this worked I'd be making $300 plus with only two dollars worth of materials geez if it actually worked I wouldn't even have made this video I'd probably just keep the secret to myself so I can roll around in the Bills of money I make up this graphene now I'm only kidding if people hoarder their scientific achievements of themselves just to make a quick buck our world would just stop technological invention so if anyone of you have the secret to mass producing wrapping give it up I'm speaking for everyone in the world right now and I'm almost 100% certain that we all want hoverboards and you know what maybe even a cell phone battery that lasts more than five minutes so if you could just please give it off this whole rafting thing thanks science

Channel: Greg I

Views: 469,907

Rating: 3.6158614 out of 5

Keywords: Graphene school project

Id: hpP2qOw_Baw

Length: 8min 38sec (518 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2016