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Tour said a concentration of as little as 0.1% of flash graphene in the cement used to bind concrete could lessen its massive environmental impact by a third. Production of cement reportedly emits as much as 8% of human-made carbon dioxide every year.

"By strengthening concrete with graphene, we could use less concrete for building, and it would cost less to manufacture and less to transport," he said. "Essentially, we're trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that waste food would have emitted in landfills. We are converting those carbons into graphene and adding that graphene to concrete, thereby lowering the amount of carbon dioxide generated in concrete manufacture. It's a win-win environmental scenario using graphene."

"Turning trash to treasure is key to the circular economy," said co-corresponding author Rouzbeh Shahsavari, an adjunct assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice and president of C-Crete Technologies. "Here, graphene acts both as a 2D template and a reinforcing agent that controls cement hydration and subsequent strength development."

In the past, Tour said, "graphene has been too expensive to use in these applications. The flash process will greatly lessen the price while it helps us better manage waste."

"With our method, that carbon becomes fixed," he said. "It will not enter the air again."

The process aligns nicely with Rice's recently announced Carbon Hub initiative to create a zero-emissions future that repurposes hydrocarbons from oil and gas to generate hydrogen gas and solid carbon with zero emission of carbon dioxide. The flash graphene process can convert that solid carbon into graphene for concrete, asphalt, buildings, cars, clothing and more, Tour said.

Flash Joule heating for bulk graphene, developed in the Tour lab by Rice graduate student and lead author Duy Luong, improves upon techniques like exfoliation from graphite and chemical vapor deposition on a metal foil that require much more effort and cost to produce just a little graphene.

Even better, the process produces "turbostratic" graphene, with misaligned layers that are easy to separate. "A-B stacked graphene from other processes, like exfoliation of graphite, is very hard to pull apart," Tour said. "The layers adhere strongly together.

But turbostratic graphene is much easier to work with because the adhesion between layers is much lower. They just come apart in solution or upon blending in composites.

"That's important, because now we can get each of these single-atomic layers to interact with a host composite," he said.

The lab noted that used coffee grounds transformed into pristine single-layer sheets of graphene.​

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