Any form of carbon-based matter can be transformed into so-called flash graphene with a process that heats carbon-containing materials to 3,000K for 10 milliseconds.
The advance from the Rice University lab of James Tour can reportedly convert a ton of coal, food waste or plastic into graphene for a fraction of the cost used by other bulk graphene-producing methods.
“This is a big deal,” Tour said in a statement. “The world throws out 30 per cent to 40 per cent of all food, because it goes bad, and plastic waste is of worldwide concern. We’ve already proven that any solid carbon-based matter, including mixed plastic waste and rubber tyres, can be turned into graphene.” The research is published in Nature.
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“With the present commercial price of graphene being $67,000 to $200,000 per ton, the prospects for this process look superb,” he said, adding that 0.1 per cent of flash graphene in the cement used to bind concrete could lessen its environmental impact by a third.
“By strengthening concrete with graphene, we could use less concrete for building, and it would cost less to manufacture and less to transport,” he said. “Essentially, we’re trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that waste food would have emitted in landfills. We are converting those carbons into graphene and adding that graphene to concrete, thereby lowering the amount of carbon dioxide generated in concrete manufacture. It’s a win-win environmental scenario using graphene.”
“Turning trash to treasure is key to the circular economy,” said co-corresponding author Rouzbeh Shahsavari. “Here, graphene acts both as a 2D template and a reinforcing agent that controls cement hydration and subsequent strength development.”
Flash Joule heating for bulk graphene, developed in the Tour lab by Rice graduate student and lead author Duy Luong, is claimed to improve upon techniques like exfoliation from graphite and chemical vapour deposition on a metal foil that require much more effort and cost to produce small quantities of graphene.
The process also produces turbostratic graphene, with misaligned layers that are easy to separate. “A-B stacked graphene from other processes, like exfoliation of graphite, is very hard to pull apart,” Tour said. “The layers adhere strongly together.

Turbostratic graphene is easier to work with as the layers come apart in solution or upon blending in composites.
“That’s important, because now we can get each of these single-atomic layers to interact with a host composite,” he said.
The flash process happens in a custom-designed reactor that heats material quickly and emits all noncarbon elements as gas. “When this process is industrialised, elements like oxygen and nitrogen that exit the flash reactor can all be trapped as small molecules because they have value,” Tour said.
He said the flash process produces very little excess heat, channelling almost all of its energy into the target. “You can put your finger right on the container a few seconds afterwards,” Tour said. “And keep in mind this is almost three times hotter than the chemical vapour deposition furnaces we formerly used to make graphene, but in the flash process the heat is concentrated in the carbon material and none in a surrounding reactor.
Tour hopes to produce a kilogram a day of flash graphene within two years.
Sounds too good to be true.
If this process can be scaled up to a commercial level,it could change the World. Good luck to these brilliant scientists.
Wow, a whole kg! in two years !
Science certainly moves at its own pace these days.
I have to say my “question this” antenna is vibrating like mad. The old adage, if is sounds too good to be true it probably is, seems to fit here.
Sounds promising if it can be industrialised, I wonder how much energy is used in the process itself, and what happens to the remaining non-carbon residues?
This seems quite brilliant but I’m inclined to be sceptical of so many scientific papers that claim wonderful results, obviously looking to attact finance but which are yet at an almost unbelievably early stage.
I watched the video but it didn’t show the output – only a tiny bit of carbon black being introduced as input.
They’re hoping to scale it up to produce one kilogram a day in two years time so that suggests it could be quite a long time before commercial quantitities can be made.
I certainly do hope it works at scale and I wish this team every success but will reserve my delight until I see signs of commercial production.
@ nick cole: it is 7.2 kJ/g in electricity. If you converted to price per ton for electricity in the US is $100 /ton. The residue that is not carbon will evaporate out at 3000 K.
@ Allen: please see the original paper for the image of the flash graphene. It looks totally different with the original carbon black. You are right to be skeptical, from discovery to industry is a totally different story. There are so much little thing that need to account for to have a real production.
Yes should work ,GRAPHENE when we did not know what it was in the sixties caused problems with deposition on copper flexibles during heat treatment of carbon brushes , which was very difficult to stop and almost impossible to remove , Also we had a furnace which ran up to 2850 producing very pure oxidation resistant graphite with only parts per million of impurities . This just makes very small quantities very fast . Could be difficult to make in larger quantities ,but auto filling and emptying of smaller quantities could lead to a workable cost effective solution
This is a great bit of work yet its treated with criticism. They are advising us of a working process that is now at laboratory scale. Of course any research is subject to finding the rough spots and hopefully finding a way around them. People who ask for an exact budget and timeline for research deserve the answers they will get.
Lets all be thankful that there are organisations that know you have many small projects developing new ideas and working to fulfill the promise. When researchers can see that their bright idea will never be funded beyond the novelty stage they migrate to countries that have more imagination or just more money to invest in the future. In the long term those countries will be the leaders.
Nice that Duy Luong has responded to the question posted.
Wish him all the luck and success with this.
Something in the back of my mind says “cold fusion”. Lots of news reports quoting the paper, very little comment from other workers in the field.
Thanks, Duy and Good Luck with the work!
Kind regards
Alien