Graphene scale-up and quality control

Graphene manufacturing in six panels: roll-to-roll CVD in a concentric-tube reactor, a roll-to-roll transfer line onto PET, metre-sized single crystals on industrial Cu foil, THz sheet-conductance and Raman quality maps, and the framework that classifies graphene-based materials.

1. Roll-to-roll CVD: A 0.25-inch Cu foil wound 1.5 turns round a 13 mm quartz tube moves through the 4.5 mm gap inside a 25 mm tube; annealed in H₂, then grown in CH₄/H₂ at 1010 °C and 4 Torr, at 25–500 mm/min (Polsen et al. 2015). 2. Roll-to-roll transfer: Thermal release tape, through a Cu etchant and a rinse, released onto PET by hot rollers and doped wet-chemically (Bae et al. 2010); the tape holds firmly at room temperature and lets go when heated (Woo 2019). 3. Single crystals: Temperature-gradient annealing turned industrial polycrystalline Cu foil into metre-sized single-crystal Cu(111); a 5 × 50 cm film grew in 20 min (Xu et al. 2017). 4. THz conductance map: Sheet conductance of 10 × 10 mm chips of CVD graphene mapped contactless by THz time-domain spectroscopy (Melios et al. 2020; Cultrera et al. 2019). 5. Raman map: The 2D width and I(2D)/I(G) mapped against the NPL criteria, ≤ 35 cm⁻¹ and ≥ 2: 26.2 ± 1.7 cm⁻¹ and 2.4 ± 0.7 over 32 × 32 µm of CVD graphene on Si/SiO₂ at 532 nm (Muñoz-Vargas et al. 2025). 6. What kind of graphene: Graphene-based materials classified by number of layers, average lateral size and atomic C/O ratio (Wick et al. 2014); few-layer graphene has 3 to 10 layers and nanoplatelets are 100 nm to 100 µm across (ISO/TS 80004-13, as Nicoletti et al. 2024 quote it).

Starting materials: Cu foil, methane and hydrogen; CVD graphene films. Product: Graphene films by the metre, quality maps and a material classification.

Polsen et al., “High-speed roll-to-roll manufacturing of graphene using a concentric tube CVD reactor”, Sci. Rep. 2015 (doi:10.1038/srep10257); Bae et al., “Roll-to-roll production of 30-inch graphene films for transparent electrodes”, Nat. Nanotechnol. 2010 (doi:10.1038/nnano.2010.132); Xu et al., “Ultrafast epitaxial growth of metre-sized single-crystal graphene on industrial Cu foil”, Sci. Bull. 2017 (doi:10.1016/j.scib.2017.07.005); Melios et al., “Towards standardisation of contact and contactless electrical measurements of CVD graphene at the macro-, micro- and nano-scale”, Sci. Rep. 2020 (doi:10.1038/s41598-020-59851-1); Muñoz-Vargas et al., “Simple graphene film production by chemical vapour deposition and the use of AI for quality analysis”, Nanoscale Adv. 2025 (doi:10.1039/d5na00668f); Wick et al., “Classification framework for graphene-based materials”, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014 (doi:10.1002/anie.201403335); Woo, “Transparent conductive electrodes based on graphene-related materials”, Micromachines 2019 (doi:10.3390/mi10010013); Cultrera et al., “Mapping the conductivity of graphene with electrical resistance tomography”, Sci. Rep. 2019 (doi:10.1038/s41598-019-46713-8); Nicoletti et al., “Non-cytotoxic graphene nanoplatelets upregulate cell proliferation and self-renewal genes of mesenchymal stem cells”, Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024 (doi:10.3390/ijms25189817); Kidambi et al., “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 (doi:10.1021/acsami.8b00846).

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