The outstanding properties explain why there has been significant and increasing interest over the last decade in research and in using graphene materials in a wide range of applications in key sectors such as medical devices, energy storage, sensors, electronics, photonics, and mechanics. One of the major challenges of graphene is the development of viable production methods to generate high quality and reliable materials at commercial scale.<br/>Natural and synthetic graphite from petroleum-based carbon-rich sources are commonly used for graphene synthesis . However, these fossil precursors are non-renewable, and the graphene production process is energy intensive and non-environmentally friendly. To overcome this, we have developed green methods to produce graphene with environmentally friendly approaches using pyrolysis (800°C) and carbonization (1800°C) of biomass. Considering the low cost and high availability of non-food biomass, as well as their sustainable nature, these resources are interesting feedstocks for graphene-based materials production.<br/>The first challenge related to the use of bioresources to produce bio-graphene is the selection of the appropriate precursors and process conditions to generate biochar with high proportion of graphitic structures. Another challenge is the role of inherent or added metal in catalyzing or inhibiting the graphitization. A third challenge deals with the understanding of the interaction of carbon with metals and the resulting graphitic nanostructure. An endeavor is made in combining different investigation scales and techniques namely elemental analysis, Raman spectroscopy and X-RD pair distribution function analysis that had provided information on metal composition, defects in the carbon structure, stacking of graphene layers, and average crystallite size for randomly-organized carbons with short-range order, or highly-ordered structure while HR-TEM allowed to determine the spatial distribution of the graphitic domain. New insights on the graphitization mechanism based on the hybridization of metal promoters is also provided using XPS.

Non-conventional catalysts and multiscale approach for the thermo-chemical synthesis and investigation of bio-graphene

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.