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Harder than a diamond, stronger than steel, as flexible as rubber and lighter than aluminum. These are just some of the properties attributed to graphene. Although this material has sparked great interest in the scientific community in recent years, there is still no cheap and sustainable enough method for its high-quality manufacturing on an industrial scale.

A research team from the University of Córdoba (UCO) has just published a new prototype in the journal Chemical Engineering Journal that could precisely represent a great step forward towards the large-scale production of this material, first synthesized in 2004, with those responsible winning a Nobel Prize six years later.

This new technological design, which has already been registered for evaluation as a patent and is based on a previous patent of the team itself, increases the production of graphene by more than 22%, with the process maintaining the high quality that characterizes graphene synthesized with this technology.

The work is based on plasma technology, a partially ionized gas often referred to as the fourth state of matter. Although there are natural plasmas, such as lightning and the Northern Lights, they can also be artificially generated in a laboratory.

One of its great advantages, highlighted the study's lead author, Francisco Javier Morales, is that "it is a highly energetic medium that is capable of breaking down organic molecules very easily." Specifically, the team used this plasma torch to break down ethanol and rearrange the molecule's carbon atoms, resulting in the creation of graphene.

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