Rice University researchers have found that sound can be used to analyze the properties of laser-generated Graphene. Material characterization could be done in a wide range of engineering and manufacturing processes with the technique. Brandon Martin is a student at Rice University.
Sometimes hearing can be better than seeing.
Two brothers in a Rice University laboratory heard something strange while making a piece of Graphene. They decided that the sound could give them valuable information about the product.
John Li, a graduate of Rice University, and his brother Victor Li, a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are co-lead authors of a paper that describes the real-time analysis of laser-Induced Graphene.
The brothers were working in the lab of James Tour when they came up with their hypothesis.
John Li said that Professor Tour told them to pursue it as a potential project.
The acoustic signal processing scheme described in the results analyzes LIG in real time to determine its form and quality.
LIG, introduced by the Tour lab in 2014, is a method of making sheets of Graphene by heating the top of a thin sheet to 2,500 degrees Celsius. The technique has been used to make other materials.
Alex Lathem is an applied physics graduate student at Rice University. The lab is using sound to analyze the synthesis of Graphene. Brandon Martin is a student at Rice University.
John said that they hear different sounds under different conditions. "If we hear variations during the synthesis, we'd be able to detect different materials being formed."
He said that audio analysis allows for far greater quality control capabilities that are orders of magnitude faster than characterization of laser-induced graphene by microscopy techniques.
"In materials analysis, there are tradeoffs between cost, speed, scale, accuracy and precision, especially in terms of how much material you can systematically process," John said. We can scale the throughput of our analytical capabilities to the entire amount of material we're trying to synthesise in a robust manner thanks to what we have here.
John invited his brother to Houston so he could work in the lab. He said that he avoids areas that he knows very well and that he avoids things that he knows very well. We formed a very solid team.
He said that he made a connection between the sounds of the right product and the sounds of the different products. He is stronger than I am at certain computational techniques.
A small, $31 microphone from Amazon taped to the laser head and attached to a cellphone inside the laser cabinet picks up the audio for analysis
The brothers used a mathematical technique called a Fast Fourier transform to convert the sound pattern to data. The data can be used to quickly assess the product type and purity.
John Li said that the sounds emitted provide information on the relaxation of the energy input when the laser hits the sample and gets absorbed, transmitted, scattered, reflected or just in general converted into different types of energy. We can get local information on the properties of the Graphene.
The tour is impressed by their ingenuity.
He said that what the brothers came up with was amazing. They can determine product type and quality instantly from the sounds of the synthesis. This could be an important approach to guide manufacturing parameters.
He said sound analysis could contribute to a number of manufacturing processes, including his own lab's flash Joule heating, a method to make graphene and other materials from waste products.
Tour said the family team is formidable because of John's experimental expertise and Victor's mathematical talent. John and Victor were only 19 and 17 years old at the time of their discovery, but they demonstrated expertise way beyond their years.
The paper is co-authored by Rice graduate students Jacob Beckham and Weiyin Chen, as well as graduate students Bing Deng and Duy Luong. The T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry is located in the Department of Chemistry.
Victor D. Li and his colleagues wrote Sounds of Synthesis: Acoustic RealTime Analysis of LaserInduced Graphene, Advanced Functional Materials. There is a DOI for this.
The journal contains information about advanced functional materials.
Scientists can now listen to graphene when it speaks.
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