westurner
8 hours ago
ScholarlyArticle: "Green Mechanochemical Production of Amino-Acid-Derived N-Doped Graphene for Functional Vitrimer Composites" (2025) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.5c09378
westurner
8 hours ago
NewsArticle: "This solvent-free process makes graphene both conductive and easy to disperse" https://interestingengineering.com/science/solvent-free-proc...
westurner
8 hours ago
I've been working on a green chip fabrication concept with AI that's consumed more and more of my thoughts lately.
Whether wafers can be made out of Lignin-Vitrimer (which I learned about from NREL's work), and what are the advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages include cost and sustainability and aromatic carbon rings that can be (LCS) lased into laser-induced graphene. Disadvantages include the likelihood of wafers cupping or bowing, and an unfortunate shortage of highly-refined Lignin.
From what I've been reading (from AI and ScholarlyArticles and NewsArticles and Wikipedia), there are so many uses for Lignin that we should send an APB to the tree pulp quarterly about just buying lignin refining capability for all of the tree paper pulp factories.
I had - as a vibe physics'ed concept - Carbon Nanotube (CNT) Ink in Ethyl Lactate as the green solvent, to fill into LCS laser ablated grooves in Lignin-Vitrimer for alignment prior to locking it in with LCS (Laser Compression Shock). The model said that the Ethyl Lactate evaporating would somewhat adhere the CNT in place for lasing.
CNT Ink for this and other applications could be made with Hexyl-Cellulose or Photo-Cleavable Lignin Polymer (PCLP). Hexyl-Cellulose would leave char to vacuum/wash. PCLP would make for chips that are destroyed by UV during production at least, but a coat of regular lignin would block UV.
This concept process has foamed lignin for packaging.
Interestingly, amino acids (like in DNA) are one of the solutions that the model proposed for straining a band gap usable for transistos into carbon nanotubes. Straining centrifuge-separated nonmetallic CNT (e.g. from pyrolysis of Cellulose) with Lignin might also work. Though, in a different context the same model suggested that just centrifuging pyrolysis CVD-produced CNTs would yield 33% metallic and 66% non-metallic semiconducting carbon nanotubes, but their bandgaps aren't that wide and they're not aligned.
I got into trying to make a monochrome and then an electronic-ink -like color display out of graphene and/or carbon nanotubes. TIL that adamantane is the simplest nano diamond, and ava-adamantane has nitrogen in place of a carbon group (which is probably useful for NV centers in diamond-based quantum computers).