Technology OF PRODUCTION

While Graphite is an abundant and cheap material graphene is relatively difficult and expensive to process at large scale, especially if want wants large crystal and continuous layers.

Early production was based on the exfoliation of graphite which limited the size of continuous layers

Graphene production has shown tremendous progress in its production during  the last 10 years. 

                                       

                                        Principles of CVD growth : a gas mixture is injected in a hot reactor where deposition occurs

Thanks to the advent of chemical vapour deposition processes that can be controlled down to the monolayer thickness,  It can now be routinely produced on macroscopic large scale samples. Our production process is based on the technique of catalytic chemical vapour deposition on metal films.

The support layer is usually a copper surface that is acting as a catalyst for graphene growth

The graphene layer is then detached from its substrate and laminated on a host substrate.

We have designed a CVD process based on the pulsed injection of methane in the reactor which enable total suppression of multilayer patches which usualy occur at nucleation centers .

                                        Patterned graphene grown on standard Copper foils after transfer on oxidized silicon

in left : classical recipe, on right  : Pulsed deposition technique showing (Patent pending) details of the process in our original paper here)