A Practical Method of Graphene Production
Graphene’s rediscovery and characterization in 2004 immediately captured the imagination of the scientific world.
The Nobel Prize award to Geim and Novoselov in 2010 reflects the importance of graphene for fundamental science and for numerous applications. It is essential though to develop a reliable method for mass production of graphene to make full use of its properties on an industrial scale.
Molecular Simulation with Materials Studio
BIOVIA’s Riichi Kuwahara, as part of a large group of scientists from various universities in Japan, has recently published a paper in the Nanoscale Advances journal, “Mass production of low-boiling point solvent- and water-soluble graphene by simple salt-assisted ball milling.”
They showed that a mechanochemical reaction with salts could produce water-soluble graphene.
Molecular simulation using BIOVIA Materials Studio was essential to explain how weak acid salts make it easy to exfoliate graphite layers in low boiling point solvents.
Riichi and colleagues used highly efficient density functional code DMol3 and the state-of-the-art exchange-correlation meta-GGA functional, SCAN, to explain the mechanism behind this new, highly efficient technology.
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