As the world's appetite for carbon-based materials like graphite increases, Ohio University researchers presented evidence this week for a new carbon solid they named "amorphous graphite."
Amorphous graphite (yellow) obtained after thermal treatment at high temperature (3000K) from a random initial configuration (gray). Credit: Ohio University Physicist David Drabold and engineer Jason Trembly started with the question, "Can we make graphite from coal?" "Graphite is an important carbon material with many uses. A burgeoning application for graphite is for battery anodes in lithium-ion batteries, and it is crucial for the electric vehicle industry—a Tesla Model S on average needs 54 kg of graphite. Such electrodes are best if made with pure carbon materials, which are becoming more difficult to obtain owing to spiraling technological demand," they write in their paper, "Ab initio simulation of amorphous graphite," that published today in Physical Review Letters. "Ab initio" means "from the beginning," and their work pursues novel paths to synthetic forms of graphite from naturally occurring carbonaceous material. What they found, with several different calculations, was a layered material that forms at very high temperatures (about 3000 degrees Kelvin). Its layers stay together due to the formation of an electron gas between the layers, but they're not the perfect layers of hexagons that make up ideal graphene. This new material has plenty of hexagons, but also pentagons and heptagons. That ring disorder reduces the electrical conductivity of the new material compared with graphene, but the conductivity is still high in the regions dominated largely by hexagons. Not all hexagons "In chemistry, the process of converting carbonaceous materials to a layered graphitic structure by thermal treatment at high temperature is called graphitization. In this letter, we show from ab initio and machine learning…