The Army Corps of Engineers will work with Prof. Tour and his collaborators at Rice University through a $5.2 million, four-year grant to expand the process that turns waste into graphene through flash Joule heating, to additional materials as well. Among the initiatives is a strategy to recover cobalt, lithium and other elements through the process developed by Tour’s group.

The grant through a Department of the Interior Cooperative Research and Development Agreement will allow the Rice-based team to extend the impact of its discovery that flashing food waste and other trash with a high-voltage jolt of electricity turns it into graphene. Through further experiments, the team realized the process could do much more. We’re pushing the idea that flash Joule heating can go way beyond just graphene, Tour said.

Rice University researchers, in collaboration with teams at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and CAS, have used graphene quantum dots (GQDs) to assemble what they say may transform chemical catalysis by greatly increasing the number of transition-metal single atoms that can be placed into a carbon carrier.

The process uses functionalized graphene quantum dots to trap transition metals for higher metal loading single-atom catalysis. Illustration courtesy of the Wang Group (from Rice Uni website)

The technique uses graphene quantum dots, 3-5-nanometer particles of graphene, as anchoring supports. These facilitate high-density transition-metal single atoms with enough space between the atoms to avoid clumping.

A Rice University team has modified its laser-induced graphene technique to make high-resolution, micron-scale patterns of the conductive material for consumer electronics and other applications. Laser-induced graphene (LIG), introduced in 2014 by Rice chemist James Tour, involves burning away everything except carbon from polymers or other materials, leaving the carbon atoms to reconfigure themselves into films of characteristic hexagonal graphene. The process employs a commercial laser that writes graphene patterns into surfaces that to date have included wood, paper and even food.

The new version writes fine patterns of graphene into photoresist polymers, light-sensitive materials used in photolithography and photoengraving. Baking the film increases its carbon content, and subsequent lasing solidifies the robust graphene pattern, after which unlased photoresist is washed away.

The flash process, introduced by Tour and his colleagues at Rice University in 2020, has now been optimized to convert waste from rubber tires into graphene that can, in turn, be used to strengthen concrete.

The atoms reassemble into valuable turbostratic graphene, which has misaligned layers that are more soluble than graphene produced via exfoliation from graphite. That makes it easier to use in composite materials.

Researchers at James Tour's lab at Rice University have developed a new process, able to convert worthless pyrolyzed plastic ash into graphene. The technique produces turbostratic graphene flakes that can be directly added to other substances like films of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) that better resist water in packaging and cement paste and concrete, dramatically increasing their compressive strength.

Similarly to the flash graphene process the Tour lab introduced before, pyrolyzed ash turns into turbostratic graphene. That has weaker attractive interactions between the flakes, making it easier to mix them into solutions.

Rice University's process to produce pristine graphene in bulk from waste (dubbed flash graphene) was recently modified for recycling plastic. Instead of raising the temperature of a carbon source with direct current, as in the original process, the lab first exposes plastic waste to around eight seconds of high-intensity alternating current, followed by the DC jolt.

Post-consumer plastic received from a recycler is then mixed with carbon black and processed into turbostratic graphene via timed pulses of AC and DC electricity. Image by the Tour Group

The products are high-quality turbostratic graphene, a valuable and soluble substance that can be used to enhance electronics, composites, concrete and other materials, and carbon oligomers, molecules that can be vented away from the graphene for use in other applications.

LIGC Application, an Israeli maker of Laser-Induced Graphene filters (LIG), recently announced raising $3 Million in Series A funding. Wuhan-based public listed company Hubei Forbon Technology made the investment.

The company intends to use the funds to scale and manufacture its filters.

Materials scientists at Rice University and the University of Pennsylvania have published an article calling for a collective, global effort to fast-track the mass production of 2D materials like graphene and molybdenum disulfide.

In their perspective article, journal editor-in-chief Jun Lou and colleagues make a case for a focused, collective effort to address the research challenges that could clear the way for large-scale mass production of 2D materials.

Researchers at Rice University design a "shield" made of graphene oxide, that helps particles destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria and free-floating antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater treatment plants.

The labs of Rice environmental scientist Pedro Alvarez and Yalei Zhang, a professor of environmental engineering at Tongji University, Shanghai, introduced these microspheres wrapped in graphene oxide. Alvarez and his partners in the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) have worked toward quenching antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" since first finding them in wastewater treatment plants in 2013.

Rice University scientists led by Prof. James Tour have turned adhesive tape into a silicon oxide film (mixed with laser-induced graphene) which replaces troublesome anodes in lithium metal batteries.

At left, a copper current collector with a laser-induced silicon oxide coating created at Rice University. At right, a scanning electron microscope image of the coating created by lasing adhesive tape on the copper collector. Courtesy of the Tour Group

The researchers used an infrared laser cutter to convert the silicone-based adhesive of commercial tape into the porous silicon oxide coating, mixed with a small amount of laser-induced graphene from the tape’s polyimide backing. The protective silicon oxide layer forms directly on the current collector of the battery.