Graphene – Exciting Insights into the Synthesis and Chemistry of the Miracle Material of the 21^st Century and Its Implementation in Chemistry Lessons for the First Time

Andreas Schedy^1, , Dominik Quarthal¹ and Marco Oetken¹

¹Department of Chemistry, Physics, Technology and their teaching methodologies, Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg, Kunzenweg 21, 79117 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Cite this paper

Andreas Schedy, Dominik Quarthal and Marco Oetken. Graphene – Exciting Insights into the Synthesis and Chemistry of the Miracle Material of the 21^st Century and Its Implementation in Chemistry Lessons for the First Time. World Journal of Chemical Education. 2018; 6(1):43-53. doi: 10.12691/WJCE-6-1-8

Abstract

The two-dimensional modification of carbon which is also known as “graphene” is an extremely interesting material due to its physical properties, such as a very high electrical conductivity and an intrinsic mechanical strength that is even better than that of steel. For that reason, it has already been called the “miracle material“ of the 21^st century. Up to now, the synthesis of graphene was to dangerous to implement it into the school curricula. The authors present a method of synthesizing graphene which can be put into practice at school without hesitation. Following experiments show the varying properties of graphene oxide and graphene during synthesis. In this way, different structure-property relationships, which appear to be one of the most important concepts in chemistry lessons, can be analyzed.

Keywords

electrical energy storage systems, supercapacitors, graphene, structure-property relationships

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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