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Synthesis challenges for graphene industry

Nature Materials volume 18, pages 520–524 (2019)Cite this article

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The past few years have witnessed significant development in graphene research, yet a number of challenges remain for its commercialization and industrialization. This Comment discusses relevant issues for industrial-scale graphene synthesis, one of the critical aspects for the future graphene industry.

Graphene has been an emerging material for modern chemistry and physics owing to its fascinating property profile1. Since its first isolation2, scientific development regarding its synthesis methodologies and related applications has been inspiringly progressing, suggesting that graphene would revolutionize the industry with its superlative properties3,4. Many start-up companies have been pursuing the industrial production of graphene for commercial applications, including electronics, defence, healthcare and energy5. The global graphene market is predicted to exceed £150 million by 20226. However, real commercialization of graphene has been far from an overnight success7.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the most common commercial products of graphene and its derivatives: graphene nanoflakes, GO and continuous graphene films.
Fig. 2: Production capacity and quality of commercial graphene products.
Fig. 3: Finding killer applications of graphene.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (numbers 2016YFA0200101 and 2014CB932500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (numbers 51432002, 51520105003, 21525310 and 51362029), and the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission (numbers Z161100002116002 and Z16110000211602).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing Science and Engineering Center for Nanocarbons, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Li Lin, Hailin Peng & Zhongfan Liu

  2. Beijing Graphene Institute, Beijing, China

    Hailin Peng & Zhongfan Liu

Authors
  1. Li Lin
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  2. Hailin Peng
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  3. Zhongfan Liu
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Correspondence to Hailin Peng or Zhongfan Liu.

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Lin, L., Peng, H. & Liu, Z. Synthesis challenges for graphene industry. Nat. Mater. 18, 520–524 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0341-4

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