Easy Graphene Production with a Laser Engraver

Graphene isn’t easy to produce at scale. But making small batches of graphene is doable in a few ways. [Robert Murray-Smith] decided to try producing “flash graphene.” This requires a big capacitor bank that is moderately expensive, so he decided to explain a different technique he read about using an ordinary laser cutter. Check it out in the video below.

We were a little disappointed that he didn’t actually make any graphene this time. He has, however, used other methods in other videos to create some type of graphene. In fact, he has many similar videos going back quite a ways as well as applications with concrete, capacitors, and more. We understand that this method doesn’t produce monolayer graphene, but actually creates a graphene “foam” with interesting properties. [Robert] talks about recent papers that show you can grow graphene on things other than Kapton tape using this method.

If you decide you’d like to try this out, we’d love to see your results. [James Tour] from Rice University has a video about laser-induced graphene that might help you, too. We’ve seen [Zachary Tong] using this method, as well. The flash process is interesting, too, because when compared to most other methods it seems more scalable.