Virginia Tech develop process to 3D print graphene

[Virgina Tech Daily, LINK] Researchers from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a novel process to 3D print graphene, one of the strongest materials ever tested, at a higher resolution that was an order of magnitude greater than ever printed before. 

 

“It’s a significant breakthrough compared to what’s been done, ... We can access pretty much any desired structure you want.” Ryan Hensleigh said, lead author of the article [article below] and now a third-year Macromolecular Science and Engineering Ph.D. student at Virgina Tech.

 

3D graphene foams exhibit immense degradation of mechanical properties. Micro-architecture can alleviate this problem, but no current technique meets the manufacturing requirements. Herein we developed a light-based 3D printing process to create hierarchical graphene structures with arbitrary complexity and order-of-magnitude finer features, showing enhanced mechanical properties at decreasing density. Picture credit : Open Access CC BY-NC 3.0 "Additive manufacturing of complex micro-architected graphene aerogels" Ryan M. Hensleigh et al Mater. Horiz., 2018, Advance Article, DOI:10.1039/C8MH00668G