Home » New touch screen technology replaces rare metal indium with graphene: performance has not declined – Scientific Exploration – cnBeta.COM

New touch screen technology replaces rare metal indium with graphene: performance has not declined – Scientific Exploration – cnBeta.COM

by admin

While indium is one of the rarest metals on Earth, it is a key ingredient in ubiquitous electronic devices. Engineers have now demonstrated a way to swap indium for graphene to make devices with exactly the same electronic properties. Indium tin oxide (ITO) films are highly conductive and light transmissive, making them perfect for a variety of display technologies – including LCD, OLED, e-ink and touchscreens as well as LED lighting, glass coatings and solar cells.

access:

ECS year-end special: cloud server as low as 38 yuan / year

The thing is, indium isn’t exactly common. While technically more abundant than things like gold and silver, indium is rarely found in the Earth’s crust as an element, so it must be extracted as a by-product of mining other metals, usually zinc. To that end, it appears on key raw material lists in Europe, the US, Australia and Japan.

It’s not surprising to see that scientists are actively looking for more common alternatives. Previous work has found promising candidates in carbon nanotubes, copper nanowires or new glassy polymers. Now, in a new study, researchers from Paragraf and Queen Mary University of London may have found one, in the form of everyone’s favorite wonder material, graphene.

Graphene is composed of sheets of carbon that are only one atom thick, and exhibits a variety of useful electronic and optical properties, which of course is also very important because carbon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth.

The researchers first used a technique called metal organic chemical vapor deposition, which deposits a layer of graphene on a transparent substrate. Graphene is doped with nitric acid to increase its conductivity, then laser-etched into a specific pattern to make it an anode. The resulting graphene-based OLED devices performed as well as older indium tin oxide devices, the team said.

See also  Migrants, boat with 49 people on board sinks off the coast of Tunisia: 35 dead

While other studies have shown how graphene can be used as a replacement for indium, none of the devices they have produced have yet been as efficient and conductive as the original. The key issue, the research team noted, is that graphene is typically laid on a metal catalyst using a different deposition method and then transferred to a transparent substrate, and that this extra step introduces impurities that affect performance.

“There have been many attempts to replace ITO due to its importance and scarcity, but until now no material has been found with comparable performance in electronic or optical devices,” said Professor Colin Humphreys, co-corresponding author of the study. “Our paper is the first in the world to demonstrate that graphene can replace ITO in electronic/optical devices. We have shown that graphene-OLEDs have the same performance as ITO-OLEDs.”

But some puzzles still need to be solved before the so-called wonder material becomes the silver bullet that scientists hope. Despite its scarcity, indium is still relatively cheap, although graphene is currently expensive to mass produce. But this economic landscape is changing, and companies like Paragraf are developing production methods to produce graphene at scale at lower cost.

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

Privacy & Cookies Policy