Scalable production of large quantities of defect-free few-layer graphene by shear exfoliation in liquids.

To progress from the laboratory to commercial applications, it will be necessary to develop industrially scalable methods to produce large quantities of defect-free graphene. Here we show that high-shear mixing of graphite in suitable stabilizing liquids results in large-scale exfoliation to give dispersions of graphene nanosheets. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy show the exfoliated flakes to be unoxidized and free of basal-plane defects. We have developed a simple model that shows exfoliation to occur once the local shear rate exceeds 10(4) s(-1). By fully characterizing the scaling behaviour of the graphene production rate, we show that exfoliation can be achieved in liquid volumes from hundreds of millilitres up to hundreds of litres and beyond. The graphene produced by this method performs well in applications from composites to conductive coatings. This method can be applied to exfoliate BN, MoS2 and a range of other layered crystals.

Boron nitride nanosheets as barrier enhancing fillers in melt processed composites.

In this work we have used melt-processing to mix liquid-exfoliated boron-nitride nanosheets with PET to produce composites for gas barrier applications. Sonication of h-BN powder, followed by centrifugation-based size-selection, was used to prepare suspensions of nanosheets with aspect ratio >1000. The solvent was removed to give a weakly aggregated powder which could easily be mixed into PET, giving a composite containing well-dispersed nanosheets. These composites showed very good barrier performance with oxygen permeability reductions of 42% by adding just 0.017 vol% nanosheets. At low loading levels the composites were almost completely transparent. At higher loading levels, while some haze was introduced, the permeability fell by ∼70% on addition of 3 vol% nanosheets.