Jun 23, 2010

Graphene: Flexible touch screen, made from a sheet of carbon the thickness of one atom!

Catching up on reading the MIT Technology Review, I came across an article written by Nidhi Subbaraman about the use of graphene to make flexible displays:

Flexible Touch Screen Made with Printed Graphene:  Sheets of atom-thick carbon could make displays that are super-fast

The most recent version of graphene was created by researchers in Korea at the Sungkyunkwan University, in collaboration with Samsung.  According to the article, graphene was discovered over thirty years ago, but only recently have researchers been able to produce it in large mono-layers. This flexibility looks like it will have possibilities for future display applications, as noted in the video clip below the photos.

Photo Credit: Byung Hee Hong, SKKU.
rolltoroll
Photo Credit: Impact Lab
"Future Applications of Graphene"


RELATED
Roll-to-roll production of 30-inch graphene films for transparent electrodes
Nature Nanotechnology 6/20/2010
Sukang Bae, Hyeongkeun Kim, Youngbin Lee, Xiangfan Xu, Jae-Sung Park, Yi Zheng, Jayakumar Balakrishnan, Tian Lei, Hye Ri Kim, Young Il Song, Young-Jin Kim, Kwang S. Kim, Barbaros Özyilmaz, Jong-Hyun Ahn, Byung Hee Hong & Sumio Iijima
ABSTRACT:
"The outstanding electrical1, mechanical2, 3 and chemical4, 5 properties of graphene make it attractive for applications in flexible electronics6, 7, 8. However, efforts to make transparent conducting films from graphene have been hampered by the lack of efficient methods for the synthesis, transfer and doping of graphene at the scale and quality required for applications. Here, we report the roll-to-roll production and wet-chemical doping of predominantly monolayer 30-inch graphene films grown by chemical vapour deposition onto flexible copper substrates. The films have sheet resistances as low as ~125 Ω −1 with 97.4% optical transmittance, and exhibit the half-integer quantum Hall effect, indicating their high quality. We further use layer-by-layer stacking to fabricate a doped four-layer film and measure its sheet resistance at values as low as ~30 Ω −1 at ~90% transparency, which is superior to commercial transparent electrodes such as indium tin oxides. Graphene electrodes were incorporated into a fully functional touch-screen panel device capable of withstanding high strain."


Korean Researchers Open Door to Bendable Electronics
(Includes information from an interview with Hong Byung-hee, a chemistry professor at Sungkyunkwan University)
Graphene OLED Thin Film Displays


Nanogenerators:  Fully Rollable Transparent Nanogenerators Based on Graphene Electrodes Advanced Materials, Vol.22, No. 19 5/18/2010




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