Rusting iron can be its own worst enemy

Simulations show iron catalyzes corrosion in 'inert' carbon dioxide

26-Jan-2022 - Iron that rusts in water theoretically shouldn’t corrode in contact with an “inert”supercritical fluidof carbon dioxide. But it does. The reason has eluded materials scientists to now, but a team at Rice University has a theory that could contribute to new strategies to protect iron from the ...

Flash graphene rocks strategy for plastic waste

Rice University lab detours potential environmental hazard into useful material

03-Nov-2020 - Plastic waste comes back in black as pristine graphene, thanks to ACDC. That's what Rice University scientists call the process they employed to make efficient use of waste plastic that would otherwise add to the planet's environmental woes. In this instance, the lab of Rice chemist James Tour ...

Scientists find path to nanodiamond from graphene

A spot of pressure enables chemical conversion to hardened 2D material

02-Nov-2020 - Marrying two layers of graphene is an easy route to the blissful formation of nanoscale diamond, but sometimes thicker is better. While it may only take a bit of heat to turn a treated bilayer of the ultrathin material into a cubic lattice of diamane, a bit of pressure in just the right place can ...

Graphene forms under microscope's eye

Scientists shrink laser-induced graphene for flexible electronics

14-Feb-2020 - You don't need a big laser to make laser-induced graphene (LIG). Scientists at Rice University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT Knoxville) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are using a very small visible beam to burn the foamy form of carbon into microscopic patterns. The labs ...

Laser-induced graphene gets tough, with help

Combining conductive foam with other materials for capable new composites

15-Feb-2019 - Laser-induced graphene (LIG), a flaky foam of the atom-thick carbon, has many interesting properties on its own but gains new powers as part of a composite. The labs of Rice University chemist James Tour and Christopher Arnusch, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, ...

Shedding light on - and through - 2D materials

26-Sep-2018 - The ability of metallic or semiconducting materials to absorb, reflect and act upon light is of primary importance to scientists developing optoelectronics - electronic devices that interact with light to perform tasks. Rice University scientists have now produced a method to determine the ...

Nanotube 'rebar' makes graphene twice as tough

Material shows promise for flexible electronics

08-Aug-2018 - Rice University researchers have found that fracture-resistant "rebar graphene" is more than twice as tough as pristine graphene. Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon. On the two-dimensional scale, the material is stronger than steel, but because graphene is so thin, it is still subject ...

Nearly pure nanotubes from unusual catalyst

30-Jul-2018 - Growing a batch of carbon nanotubes that are all the same may not be as simple as researchers had hoped, according to Rice University scientists. Rice materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his team bucked a theory that when growing nanotubes in a furnace, a catalyst with a specific atomic ...

Sculpting with graphene foam

18-Jun-2018 - Rice University scientists have developed a simple way to produce conductive, three-dimensional objects made of graphene foam. The squishy solids look and feel something like a child's toy but offer new possibilities for energy storage and flexible electronic sensor applications, according to ...

For graphite pellets, just add elbow grease

26-Mar-2018 - It's easy and economical to make shiny pellets of graphite from functionalized graphene, according to scientists at Rice University. A report shows how chemically altered graphene powder can be pressed into a lightweight, semiporous solid that retains many of the strong and conductive qualities ...