Aug 2, 2011 07:55 GMT  ·  By
A hybrid material that combines a fine aluminum mesh with a single-atom-thick layer of graphene outperforms materials common to current touch screens and solar cells
   A hybrid material that combines a fine aluminum mesh with a single-atom-thick layer of graphene outperforms materials common to current touch screens and solar cells

A group of physicists at the Rice University announces the development of a new type of electrodes, which are heavily based on the carbon compound graphene. These components will facilitate the creation of flexible, transparent and twistable electronics.

Graphene is undoubtedly the most promising material in the world today. It is a 2D carbon compound that features a hexagonal, honeycomb-like structure. This gives it extremely interesting physical and chemical properties, which is why scientists are so interested in it.

In fact, the material was only discovered about 6years ago at the University of Manchester. Its creators already won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies. Since then, thousands of scientific papers have been published about the compound, whose traits nonetheless remain largely mysterious.

At Rice, experts focused on using a hybrid form of graphene to replace indium tin oxide (ITO) as the main material used nowadays for the creation of transparent, conductive coatings for touch screens.

The price of ITO increased several times over recently, given that the material is not readily available. This drives the price of the electronic equipments themselves through the roof, but the new material developed at Rice could curb that trend.

The new investigation was conducted in the lab of James Tour, who is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry at Rice, as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at the university.

He and his team believe that the graphene hybrid they developed could revolutionize touch-screen displays, solar panels and LED lighting technologies. The team published details of the new material in the latest online issue of the esteemed scientific journal ACS Nano.

“Many people are working on ITO replacements, especially as it relates to flexible substrates. Other labs have looked at using pure graphene. It might work theoretically, but when you put it on a substrate, it doesn't have high enough conductivity at a high enough transparency,” the team leader says.

“It has to be assisted in some way,” Tour explains. The Rice team augments its graphene with a fine grid of metal nanowire, which is placed atop a single-layer sheet of highly conductive graphene.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the new research is that it produced a material that can be made readily available. Despite its complexity, “this material is ready to scale right now,” Tour says.

The new study was supported by funds from the Office of Naval Research Graphene MURI program and the Air Force Research Laboratory, through the University Technology Corporation.

Additional support was provided by the USAF Office of Scientific Research and the Lockheed Martin Corp./LANCER IV program.

“Now that we know it works fine on flexible substrates, this brings the efficacy of graphene a step up to its potential utility,” Tour concludes.