As the world's appetite for carbon-based materials increases, Ohio University researchers presented evidence this week for a new carbon solid.
The question was posed by physicist David Drabold and engineer.
Graphite is used in many different ways. It is crucial for the electric vehicle industry to have a good supply ofGraphite, as it is used for battery anodes. The paper, "Ab initio simulation of amorphous graphite", was published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.
"Ab initio" means "from the beginning" and their work pursues novel paths to synthetic forms of Graphite from naturally occurring carbonaceous material. They found a material that forms at very high temperatures and was made from multiple layers. It's layers stay together because of the formation of an electron gas between them. There are lots of hexagonals in this new material. The ring disorder reduces the electrical conductivity of the new material, but it's still high in the areas dominated by hexagons.
Not all of the hexagonal shapes.
Graphitization is the process of converting carbonaceous materials to a graphitic structure. In this letter, we show that pure carbon networks have an overwhelming proclivity to convert to a multi-layer structure in a significant density and temperature window. Drabold is a professor of physics and astronomy in the college of arts and sciences.
The "stacking registry" ofGraphite is only statistically respected since this phase is topologically disorganized. We discuss the formation of a delocalized electron gas in the galleries and show that it is partly due to the low density electron gas. The in-plane electronic Conductivity is much less than that of Graphene.
The researchers expect their announcement to spur experimentation and studies regarding the existence of a substance that may be testable.
The Institute for sustainable energy and the environment in the Russ College of Engineering and Technology at Ohio University has been working on green uses of coal. He and Drabold worked together on the research. Drabold has published a number of papers on the theory of carbon and Graphene in recent years. The graduate students who carried out this research were praised by Drabold.
Interplane coordination is surprising.
Drabold said that the question that led them to this was whether they could make Graphite from Coal. The paper doesn't fully answer the question, but it shows that carbon has an overwhelming tendency to layer, but with many "defects" such as pentagons and heptagons. There is evidence that there is a process of formation. It has been suspected from experiments that graphitization occurs near 3000 K, but the details of the formation process and nature of disorder in the planes was not known.
A new phase of carbon is predicted by the Ohio University researchers.
It wasn't obvious until we did this that the layers of Graphene would stick together. It is likely that experimentalists will go hunting for this stuff now that it exists. Carbon is the miracle element and you can make a lot of things with it. The basic physics of how and why the planes bind is quite surprising for technical reasons.
More information: R. Thapa et al, Ab Initio Simulation of Amorphous Graphite, Physical Review Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.236402 Journal information: Physical Review Letters
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