Making Graphene Foam From Table Sugar

[Music] hi so as to go over making and carbon and graphene instructions using listo ordinary table sugar it's actually quite amazing to be honest now this is pulled from paper actually not one paper a few papers so if you put blonde sugar graphene into a Google Scholar search you'll turn up lots of papers that talk about this and then use two men materials that is the sugar and a blowing agent now there are two stages to it the first stage is to heat the whole thing up slowly to 250 degrees centigrade that forms our Mellon Alden and that's the Browns to Keystone that you see it goes carbonized partially black and you get this foam out of it as long as you use a foaming agent that degenerates at that level at 250 degrees or round about 250 degrees and a really good chemical for that is ammonium chloride so essentially what you do is you mix the sugar with ammonium chloride at a 50/50 ratio so equal weights stick it in something a tune has for the heat up to 250 degrees centigrade pretty much your oven and it will go that sticky brown caramel reaction that you recognize is forming that biopolymer the ammonium chloride will break down to ammonia and hydrochloric acid and bubble out of that mass creating a foam once that foam is created what you need to do is raise the temperature to grapha ties it so there's a two-stage process now very often in the papers you see it done in a 1 stage we're gonna do a 2 stage just so that we can usually equipment that we've got in a way that I think other people will be able to replicate quite easily now a word of warning obviously that breakdown as I just mentioned fons ammonia and hydrochloric acid now in small amounts it's not really a problem so if you're using a grandma or two it's not something to worry about if you're using a couple of kilos that's gonna be an awful lot of gas so you do need to take precautions against that probably even if you working up towards 10 grams or so you need to start thinking about those gasses that are being given off as part of that foaming pro now ammonium chloride is the major one that's used in pretty much all of the peppers sometimes they use ammonium carbonate but it's in in conjunction with ammonium chloride and they use that because it's a really good blowing agent at that temperature it breaks down into a gas and helps form those bubbles and form that foam and that's why it's been used I don't know if there are any other things because I've only ever used that myself to be honest and it works so well I'm Raven bothered but it's stunningly simple to do now you need to choose some kind of way so I'm going to do 10 grams as it happens so way out 10 grams of our sugar and then 10 grams of my ammonium chloride and then what I need to do is get them into intimate contacts because this works best if the thing is dry and they've been well mixed together and obviously what I've got here is a mortar and pestle and you just go around them with your water and pestle grinding them up together a little bit the more time you spend grinding that the better get them into nice intimate contact and then we're gonna remember heat it only to 250 degrees so glass is gonna be fine we'll stick that in the glass and then stick it in the oven so let me grind that a little bit and get back to you okay so here's my ground sugar and ammonium chloride I'm convincing the surplus beaker and I'm gonna put it in here this is my vacuum drying oven this about about 300 degrees centigrade so 250 is not a challenge for it bird it raises the temperature slowly and that's one of the key things apparently one of the important things is to raise that by about 4 degrees in minute or something like that so you have to have the temperature raised slowly you can't just bung it into a hot over oven and hope you get a good result in to raise the temperature slowly and that's why I'm using this because I can raise that temperature in a nice even way around about 4 degrees a minute and all you do is pop it in there and turn that off when we give that some time now obviously 4 degrees a minute 250 degrees centigrade it's gonna be a while so let's let that cook so in the paper it said roundabout 250 so it's at 248 now and it's taken a couple of hours to get there which is probably good because like say it had to be 4 degrees a minute more or less so if we open that up it's not we got Oh fascinating I've obviously got the heat glove on but there you go we can see that we've got actually quite a nice carbon phone as I've taken the carbon film out of the glass and it's actually really quite lightweight so and that bit was exactly what the paper sent to do really I mean it didn't talk about an inert atmosphere but I didn't do that obviously interested in air and it seems to have worked just fine so what we now need to do is the second part of the paper now the other lots of other papers talk about raising it to 1350 degrees I did bring one paper that talked about a thousand degrees there quite high temperatures obviously I'm going to try to take hundred degrees so I am varying a bit from the paper here now lots of the papers doing inert atmospheres usually with the argon that's complete not to pains what we're going to do is the usual trick of a reduced oxygen atmosphere because I think that the argon is there just to remove the optician to stop the carbon burning away because this is a reticulated carbon foam at the moment and what we want to do is and graph'it eyes it know the graphitization happens only at heat and I'm curious to see whether that graphitization given that we've got this bubble line structure will happen at 800 degree centigrade now I've tested this already and is completely non conductive so if we get any kind of conductivity out of that we should be getting get graphitization so the plan is to stick that in there put the lid on drill the hole and put a bit of carbon briquettes in there so the camera briquettes and the bits that's burn and their sacrificial so we'll have reduced oxygen atmosphere you know that's all I'm going to do is like you say pop that in there put some carbon on the top stick in the kiln 800 degrees centigrade and see what we yeah okay so we're giving this a girl remember it's had a degrees centigrade for an hour and I'd like cool down a little bit but we can take it out and we need to learn cool the table will remove it because if we remove it while it's still hot then it'll just burn away pop that well let it cool and we'll take it out okay I'm a bit smugly pleased does it happens because here it is it's come out the kiln and you can see it's a nice shiny graphite color actually the other fourth papers that I've read some of them reported didn't have a spongy feel this is actually quite hard so it's obviously different to what was done before I've tested its conductivity and actually it's quite amazing I just rest them on there about three centimeters apart then I get a resistivity of 46 ohms so we have now a reticulated graphene ik foam made from sugar and ammonium chloride and that's the step by step process on how to do it now obviously having made that the next thing to do is make a super capacitor out of it and see how that material actually performs but those are the steps I took to make this graph Enoch carbon foam out of sugar using a kiln so I hope that was of interest and I hope it answered questions that have been asked on how to make these foams out of ordinary table sugar and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 54,375

Rating: 4.9317536 out of 5

Keywords: graphene, graphene foam, fwg, robert, smith, super capacitors, supercapacitors, foam, murray-smith, carbon

Id: hKoXk9s2LI8

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020

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