Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new method to make large pieces of high-quality, thin atomic graphene. Researchers believe that this new manufacturing method can produce ultra-light flexible solar cells, as well as two new types of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronic products. According to reports, the process is relatively easy to reach the scale of industrial production.
This process involves the middle "buffer" material layer, which is the key to the success of the manufacturing technology. The buffer layer makes the ultra-thin graphene sheet less than 1 nanometer thick, and can be easily lifted from its substrate, thereby enabling rapid roll-to-roll manufacturing. Scientists have been working hard to find a way to produce thin, large-area, transparent, and stable electrodes in the open air.
Such materials can be used for various applications in optoelectronic devices such as computers and smartphone screens. One of the great benefits of graphene is that it is a form of pure carbon, with atoms arranged in a flat hexagonal array, with good electrical and mechanical properties. This material is very thin, physically flexible, and built with rich and inexpensive materials.
This material is easy to use copper as a seed layer and grow large pieces of material by chemical vapor deposition. The trickiest part is finding a way to release graphene from its native copper substrate. New technologies developed by researchers at MIT can reliably produce large-area graphene sheets.
According to reports, the key is a buffer layer made of a polymer called p-xylene, which is consistent with the graphene sheet deployed on the atomic level. Para-xylene is produced by chemical vapor deposition, which simplifies the manufacturing process and scalability. Current prototype graphene-based solar cells increase the power delivered per unit weight by approximately 36 times, and the amount of material used per unit area is 1/200 of the transparent electrode.
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