Graphene, batteries and capacitors

[Sally S]

Hi there,

It's widely predicted that graphene is going to revolutionise batteries and capacitors
and hence the convenience of using gadgets, electric cars... etc

I would like to build, and play with, a home made capacitor using graphene.
However, i have no idea where to buy graphene or whether substituting graphene
for aluminium foil in a aluminium foil-and-paper recipe, would work, or not.
Does graphene come as a foil, like aluminium ?

Thank you to anyone who offers any suggestions or insights

Have a nice day

Sally

 

[tomizett]

Well... Welcome to ETO.
I'm afraid that's all I can offer, though, as I know next to nothing about graphine (other than it's been touted as the miracle cure for everything from climate change to the sore knees).
I don't even know if graphine has been manufactured in comercial quantities yet.
There are people here who have good materials and physics/chemistry knowledge, but I wonder if you might be better asking on a more chemistry or physics related forum?
Certainly the place to start would be by reading as much as you can find from the places researching graphine, and find out what the state-of-the-art is in manufacturing the stuff. Maybe you could contact some of these institutions and see if graphine is available to the pubic?

Others may have more to add, but if you do find anything interesating, don't forget to share your findings here!

 

[Sally S]

Hi tomizett,

Thanks for your reply.

You might be right about asking graphene related questions on a chemistry forum.

It seems that graphene _is_ available commercially in China (as you might expect)
But there's various forms of graphene... most are not the real McCoy.
There's a graphene oxide product (which i understand is a powder), which looks promising.
These are available on alibaba.com. Most companies want to sell you kilogram volumes
but there are some companies that will sell small quantities, like one gram, or 10 grams.

I was hoping for a graphene paint that i could apply to both sides of a good insulator.
It's not clear to me whether this exist, or not: I need to do more googling.

It's also possible to buy graphene water filters. There's a company in USA that is
claiming they can desalinate sea water at 1/9th the cost of conventional methods.
This might prompt new attempts at greening the deserts in Israel, Saudi Arabia,
various African countries... etc.

This also offers hope of finding an inexpensive way of removing fluoride from
drinking water (which is left in situ by regular water filters).

I will update this thread as i learn more.

 

[tomizett]

Very interesting. It's not often in this era that a new material becomes available, so it's understandable that it's generated a lot of excitement.
It's also not often that the home experimenter gets to expeient with these new meterials work on the leading-edge of research - so good luck with it.