Industrial-scale production of high-quality graphene sheets by millstone grinders

Abstract

Graphene exhibits a variety of unprecedented innate properties and has sparked great interest in both fundamental science and regarding prospective commercial applications. To meet the ever-increasing demand for high-quality graphene sheets, an industrial-scale, reliable, environmental-friendly, low-cost production process is required. However, large-scale production high quality graphene remains elusive. Here we demonstrate a scalable mechanical cleavage method for large-quantity production of high quality large-area and few-layer graphene sheets by introducing a millstone grinding process. The average thickness of the graphene sheets is around 5 nm. This procedure is simpler than the state-of-the-art methods that allows for scalable preparation of graphene dispersion in hundreds of litres by mechanical cleavage of graphite, and the yield is 30%–40%. The size of the prepared graphene sheets can be tuneable from few micrometers to tens of micrometers by varying the dimension of raw graphite, which is larger than that produced by the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, comparing to conductive agents, the conductivity of wafers containing graphene can be increased by one order of magnitude, suggesting a high potential of the prepared graphene sheets for the application as conductive agent in lithium battery cathodes. This allows the requirements of different sizes graphene sheets for industry applications in different fields.