If you thought cooking oil was just for cooking, the researchers from Australia is here to prove you wrong. They have discovered a method to turn regular soybean oil into one of the most versatile materials today — Graphene. This technique could reduce costs of creating the said material by an extreme amount as cooking oil is relatively cheap.
For those of you that don’t know what graphene is, here’s a brief introduction. It’s basically a single sheet of carbon atoms that’s around 200 times stronger than steel. It also has the toughness of a diamond, which is the hardest rock on earth. If you think that isn’t awesome enough, it’s also extremely flexible, which makes it an all-around material for a lot of industries. In electronics, it could be used as a superconductor since it is able to carry electricity with ZERO resistance. It’s also reported as a material for the all-important semiconductors that our electronics run on today.
Source: The Manufacturer
Since it’s highly versatile, this material can single-handedly support the creation of electronics, enhancements in medicine, and the creation of better solar cells. There have been studies in the past year suggesting that graphene has the potential to filter fuel from thin air and that it could also help in enhancing the battery life of your mobile phone by 25 percent. Although it sounds like graphene is the solution to most of the problems in the manufacturing world, it is highly expensive to create. The amount of money needed to create a small fraction of this material would be best spent on labs testing it.
That’s why the discovery of the guys over at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia is considered a big leap in graphene manufacturing. Soybean oil is renewable and can be easily obtained and this air process for fabrication is “fast, simple, safe, potentially scalable, and integration-friendly,” said Zhao Jun Han, a researcher at Australia’s CSIRO. This technology is foreseen to cut down the cost of production which can open the doors towards new developments.
Source: CSIRO
The new technique is called “GraphAir” by the researchers at the lab. The soybean oil is placed inside a tube furnace and is heated for around 30 minutes, which causes it to break down into carbon. Said carbon is then rapid-cooled on a nickel foil which then diffuses into a thin sheet of graphene that’s about 1 nanometer thick. This sheet, which is 80,000 times thinner than human hair, is produced quicker than the conventional method of producing graphene. The original ‘vacuum method’ takes several hours to produce a single sheet.
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