Roll to roll - Page 3

Sony has developed a new graphene producing process that use a roll-to-roll method. They have built a machine that can produce graphene sheets up to 100 meters in length (23 cm width), and the resulting sheet is the largest area graphene sheet in the world by far (the previous record was Samsung's 40" sheet from back in 2011).

Sony's new process integrates CVD and roll-to-roll, at a temperature of 1,000°C. The idea is to directly apply a current to a copper (Cu) foil that is the catalyst of graphene and a substrate for the CVD method so that only the Cu foil is heated. As a result, the thermal load on the entire machine was drastically reduced.

MIT's new Center for Graphene Devices and Systems (MIT-CG) has an ambitious plan - to produce a one-kilometer square sheet of graphene. They are currently starting to develop the basic science and technology - which is based on the printing press. The idea is to grow graphene in a roll to roll process. MIT hopes that if they manage to develop this technology they'll enable a whole new graphene industry.

Currently they've been able to grow small sheets only using this technology (a "few centimeters" in size). The largest graphene sheet made to date was 30" square (produced by Japanese and Korean researches in June 2010) - which was also made in a roll-to-roll printing process. There were reports of a 40" graphene sheet produced by Samsung in January 2011 but these reports weren't confirmed.