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

Piran R Kidambi; Dhanushkodi D Mariappan; Nicholas T Dee; Andrey Vyatskikh; Sui Zhang; Rohit Karnik; A John Hart

doi:10.1021/acsami.8b00846

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

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2018 Mar 28;10(12):10369-10378. doi: 10.1021/acsami.8b00846. Epub 2018 Mar 19.

Authors

Piran R Kidambi^{1

2}, Dhanushkodi D Mariappan¹, Nicholas T Dee¹, Andrey Vyatskikh^{1

3}, Sui Zhang^{1

4}, Rohit Karnik¹, A John Hart¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering , Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge , Massachusetts 02139 , United States.
² Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering , Vanderbilt University , Nashville , Tennessee 37235-1826 , United States.
³ Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences , California Institute of Technology , Pasadena , California 91125 , United States.
⁴ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering , National University of Singapore , Singapore 117586.

PMID: 29553242
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b00846

Abstract

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.

Keywords: chemical vapor deposition; graphene membranes; nanoporous atomically thin membranes; polymer support casting; roll-to-roll graphene synthesis.