Flexible and transparent graphene electrodes

2009/01/16 Kortabitarte Egiguren, Irati - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Kimika

Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea have developed flexible and transparent graphene electrodes. To do this they have introduced a thin layer of graphene on two polymers that have given it the form of electrodes. These polymers are transparent. One, polyethylenterefthalate (PET), can be curved and the other, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), is elastic. Therefore, the resulting layer is an appropriate electric conductor.

Producing high-quality graphene on a large scale is no easy task. Korean researchers have used a well-known technique in the semiconductor industry, chemical vapor deposition. This technique involves mixing a substrate with several chemical compounds at high temperatures. These chemical compounds react with the surface elements obtaining a thin layer of the desired product. In this case, thin layers of graphene have been obtained from few atoms thick and several centimeters wide.

Among other things, it is an ideal material to use in portable displays. For example, it can replace indio-titanium oxide (indio-titanium oxide is expensive and not flexible). The team of researchers also studies the possibility of using these graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells.

Image courtesy of: J. H. Cong