In an earlier blog about the winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics I explained how Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov discovered graphene using very simple equipment – essentially some sticky tape and a pencil. Graphene is a single layer of graphite which is literally one carbon atom thick. It is about one hundred times stronger than steel and a better electrical conductor than copper. It is thought that it can replace silicon in transistors and find uses in touch screens and solar cells for example.

Now scientists from Rice University in the USA have shown that it is easy to make graphene from almost anything that contains carbon, for example food, insects and waste. A graduate student was explaining this to a group of Girl Scouts and said that it could even be made from their special Girl Scout biscuits. One of the scouts challenged him to do it. The graduate student, Gedung Ruan together with another student Zhengzong Sun invited the Girl Scouts to watch the process at the Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. They showed how high quality graphene could be made from the biscuits (as well as grass, plastics and even the dog faeces which were provided by their lab manager’s dog called Sid Vicious!). The process uses carbon deposition on copper foil. The graphene forms on the opposite side of the foil as the solid carbon sources decompose after fifteen minutes in a furnace at 1050 ^oC in an argon/hydrogen atmosphere.

The process produced a sheet of graphene with an area nearly the size of thirty football pitches. Zhengzong Sun estimated that with each two-inch square piece of graphene worth US$250 it would turn in a US$15 billion profit on the original purchase price of the biscuits. The serious point is that cost of producing graphene is now very low and this means that it will be more readily available for further research into its potential benefits such as for use in flat-panel and touch-screen displays, solar cells and LED lighting.

The chemists from Rice University have posted a video of the process on You Tube.