A Scalable Route to Nanoporous Large-Area Atomically Thin Graphene Membranes by Roll-to-Roll Chemical Vapor Deposition and Polymer Support Casting

作者：Kidambi Piran R^*; Mariappan Dhanushkodi D; Dee Nicholas T; Vyatskikh Andrey; Zhang Sui; Karnik Rohit; Hart A John^*

来源：ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2018, 10(12): 10369-10378.

DOI：10.1021/acsami.8b00846

• graphene membranes
• roll-to-roll graphene synthesis
• chemical vapor deposition
• nanoporous atomically thin membranes
• polymer support casting

Scalable, cost-effective synthesis and integration of graphene is imperative to realize large-area applications such as nanoporous atomically thin membranes (NATMs). Here, we report a scalable route to the production of NATMs via high-speed, continuous synthesis of large-area graphene by roll-to-roll chemical vapor deposition (CVD), combined with casting of a hierarchically porous polymer support. To begin, we designed and built a two zone roll-to roll graphene CVD reactor, which sequentially exposes the moving foil substrate to annealing and growth atmospheres, with a sharp, isothermal transition between the zones. The configurational flexibility of the reactor design allows for a detailed evaluation of key parameters affecting graphene quality and trade-offs to be considered for high-rate roll-to-roll graphene manufacturing. With this system, we achieve synthesis of uniform high-quality monolayer graphene (I-D/I-G < 0.065) at speeds >= 5 cm/min. NATMs fabricated from the optimized graphene, via polymer casting and postprocessing, show size-selective molecular transport with performance comparable to that of membranes made from conventionally synthesized graphene. Therefore, this work establishes the feasibility of a scalable manufacturing process of NATMs, for applications including protein desalting and small-molecule separations.

• 出版日期2018-3-28
• 单位MIT