New Manufacturing Methods for Producing Large Area Graphene Foil

In this Phase I SBIR project for DARPA, Graphene Materials of Austin, Texas, will design and develop new methods of manufacturing high quality monolayer and multilayer"graphene foil". The objective is to enable the production of high quality large area graphene foils for a variety of applications in nanoelectronics, thermal management, and in micro and nanoscale electro-mechanical systems. In Phase I we will build and test a new system to demonstrate the feasibility of growing single layer and multi-layer graphene as well as ultrathin graphite materials of arbitrarily large lateral dimensions. The proposed effort will offer much improved control over reaction conditions, exploit rapid heating and cooling, and will be tightly focused on methods that are scalable to large size. The metal substrate (that the graphene/ultrathin graphite will be deposited on) will be heated by RF heating. The results of Phase I will determine the best method to scale up production of graphene to large scale, which would be defined as square meters or larger. It will allow the design and construction, in Phase II, of a prototype reactor for this purpose. The goal is to aggressively target scaling for roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing of graphene and multilayer graphene foils.