Chemists create 3-D printed graphene foam

Nanotechnologists from Rice University and China's Tianjin University have used 3-D laser printing to fabricate centimeter-sized objects of atomically thin graphene.

The research could yield industrially useful quantities of bulk graphene and is described online in a new study in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

"This study is a first of its kind," said Rice chemist James Tour, co-corresponding author of the paper. "We have shown how to make 3-D graphene foams fromnongraphene starting materials, and the method lends itself to being scaled to graphene foams for additive manufacturing applications with pore-size control."