The miracle material you can make with a kitchen blender

A team of chemists found that blitzing graphite powder, dishwashing liquid and water in a blender produced black goop with flakes of graphene suspended in the water. Photo / File / Thinkstock

Graphene's reputation as a miracle material is well established but scientists have added another attribute to the carbon-derivative's Top Trumps card: you can make it using a kitchen blender.

The discovery was made by a team of scientists at Trinity College in Dublin who wanted to industrialise the process that originally led to graphene's discovery.

When it was first manufactured by a pair of chemists from Manchester University, the single atom-thick layers of carbon were isolated using the low-tech method of peeling sheets of the stuff off powdered graphite (the material found in pencil tips) with Sellotape.

The team from Dublin tried to speed up this shearing process by mixing together graphite powder, washing-up liquid and water, and then blitzing it in a high-power blender for up to half an hour at a time.

The resulting black goop contained large micrometre-sized flakes of graphene suspended in the water.

But before amateur chemists across the land reach for their pencils and the Fairy Liquid, the team of scientists, led by Jonathan Coleman, stressed that determining exactly the right balance of detergent and graphite requires the use of a lab-grade spectrometer.

And separating out the material from the solution after the blending is even more difficult, they warned.

The end product is not as high quality as that produced by labs which grow the material from vapour atom by atom but the process, which is already patented, could still be extremely useful.

The graphene flakes are suitable for an array of applications ranging from manufacturing electronics to making water bottles.

"It is a significant step towards cheap and scalable mass production, Andrea Ferrari, an expert on graphene at the University of Cambridge," told Nature.

"The material is of a quality close to the best, but with production rates apparently hundreds of times higher."

The business of manufacturing graphene is booming as investors attracted by the potential of the so-called miracle material throw money at various companies.

Graphene's nano structure. Photo / Thinkstock

However, much of the material produced is of low quality, with defects in the atomic structure or chemical contaminants reducing its efficacy.

Early studies suggest that Coleman's process could be scaled up from the kitchen blender to an industrial, 10,000-litre vat which could produce as much as 100 grams of graphene per hour.

Given that current rates of production do not generally exceed 0.4 grams-per-hour this would be significant.

"If you were to try this at home, you could use dishwashing liquid," explains Coleman in a paper published online by the journal Natural Materials.

"However, I'm not sure I'd want to make a smoothie in a blender that has just been filled with graphite."

Manchester University's Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for their work on graphene.

The material is almost completely transparent, but also extremely strong and a good conductor of electricity.

- UK Independent