A Scalable Route to Nanoporous Large-Area Atomically Thin Graphene Membranes by Roll-to-Roll Chemical Vapor Deposition and Polymer Support Casting

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 10; no. 12; pp. 10369 - 10378
• Main Authors: Kidambi, Piran R, Mariappan, Dhanushkodi D, Dee, Nicholas T, Vyatskikh, Andrey, Zhang, Sui, Karnik, Rohit, Hart, A. John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 28.03.2018; American Chemical Society (ACS)
• Subjects: Materials Science; Science & Technology - Other Topics; polymer support casting; roll-to-roll graphene synthesis; nanoporous atomically thin membranes; graphene membranes; chemical vapor deposition
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b00846

Scalable, cost-effective synthesis and integration of graphene is imperative to realize large-area applications such as nanoporous atomically thin membranes (NATMs). Here, we report a scalable route to the production of NATMs via high-speed, continuous synthesis of large-area graphene by roll-to-roll chemical vapor deposition (CVD), combined with casting of a hierarchically porous polymer support. To begin, we designed and built a two zone roll-to-roll graphene CVD reactor, which sequentially exposes the moving foil substrate to annealing and growth atmospheres, with a sharp, isothermal transition between the zones. The configurational flexibility of the reactor design allows for a detailed evaluation of key parameters affecting graphene quality and trade-offs to be considered for high-rate roll-to-roll graphene manufacturing. With this system, we achieve synthesis of uniform high-quality monolayer graphene (I D/I G < 0.065) at speeds ≥5 cm/min. NATMs fabricated from the optimized graphene, via polymer casting and postprocessing, show size-selective molecular transport with performance comparable to that of membranes made from conventionally synthesized graphene. Therefore, this work establishes the feasibility of a scalable manufacturing process of NATMs, for applications including protein desalting and small-molecule separations.