Graphene turned into dough for transport

Graphene in the form of malleable dough could be more economical to store and transport and less prone to combustion.

A team at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering made the dough by adding an ultra-high concentration of graphene oxide to water.

GO dough can be diluted to obtain gels or dried to yield hard solids. It can also be kneaded and reshaped, sustaining extreme deformation without fracture.

Jiaxing Huang, study leader, said: “My dream is to turn graphene-based sheets into a widely accessible, readily usable engineering material, just like plastic, glass and steel. I hope GO dough can inspire new uses of graphene-based materials, just like how play dough can inspire young children’s imagination and creativity.”

The dough can be shaped into dense solids that are electrically conductive and chemically stable. It can also be processed further to make bulk graphene oxide and graphene materials with tunable microstructures.

It’s also ideal for manufacturing and mass loading. Currently during transportation, GO is stored as dry solids or powders, or turned into dilute dispersions, which multiply the material’s mass by hundreds or thousands.

Huang said his last graphene oxide shipment was dispersed in 500 litres of liquid and had to be delivered by truck.

“The same amount of graphene oxide in dough form would weigh about 10 kilograms, and I could carry it myself,” Huang said.

While the inclusion of binding additives such as plastics would also turn GO into a dough state, such additives would alter the material’s properties, unlike the addition of water.

The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Communications.