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Published March 26, 2018 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

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

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.

Additional Information

© 2018 American Chemical Society. Received: January 16, 2018; Accepted: March 6, 2018; Publication Date (Web): March 19, 2018. Support to P.R.K., N.T.D., and A.J.H., and for graphene synthesis and characterization, was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under Award No. DE-SC0010795. Support to D.M. and partial support to N.T.D. was provided by a grant from the Skoltech-MIT Next Generation Programme. Membrane fabrication and testing was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Award No. DE-SC0008059 (to R.K.). SEM images in this work were acquired using facilities at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS) at Harvard University, a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award No. ECS-0335765, and the MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities at MIT, supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. DMR-1419807. The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): R.K. is a co-founder and has equity in a startup company aimed at commercializing graphene membranes.

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August 19, 2023
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