I can’t believe I missed this story from a year ago about a new technique for making graphene and the accidental discovery that was made after by the researchers working on the project.
Richard Kaner is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and UCLA. Maher El-Kady was a graduate student working in his laboratory. Together they developed a technique to fabricate graphene using an everyday DVD burner. Before they discovered this breakthrough graphene was painstakingly harvested using lithography. The volume produced was small and the work was labour intensive.
What Kaner and El-Kady discovered is they could use a consumer product, a LightScribe DVD burner to manufacture graphene on a DVD, producing enough material for 100 micro-supercapacitors on a single disc in less than 30 minutes (seen in the image below).
To read more, click here.