Monash Uni researcher relishes success

DAN Li, a winner in the Scopus young researcher of the year awards, came to Australia in 2006 to find a way to make large amounts of graphene.

DAN Li, a winner in the Scopus young researcher of the year awards, came to Australia in 2006 to find a way to make large amounts of graphene, a carbon-based nanomaterial with electrical, thermal and mechanical properties the Monash University associate professor describes as extraordinary.

He did so, helped by his University of Wollongong team and an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship. A patent was filed on the technique in 2008 and the work published in Nature Nanotechnology and Science. British researchers discovered the nanomaterial, derived from graphite, in 2004 and research into its properties and applications has grown apace.

Graphene takes the form of one-atom thick sheets in which atoms are bound together in a chicken wire-like pattern. It is a great conductor of electricity and heat and is enormously strong. But "the layers of graphene tend to stick to each other and must be separated to be of optimal use", Li says. He devised a method of separating the layers by maximising the electrostatic charge on the graphene sheets so that they repel each other. The technique turned out to be relatively inexpensive.

Graphene is used in a solution that looks like ink, easily applicable to surfaces as a coating or film. "It can be used to make much more powerful computer chips because it transfers charges very fast," Li says. "It can make the computer chips run faster than the current silicon-based chips.

"It can [also] be used to make transparent electrodes for TV or computer screens, which could replace indium-tin-oxide glass, [one of] whose source materials, indium, [is] in short supply."

Chinese-born Li was a rising star at Nanjing's University of Science and Technology before he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Seattle's University of Washington. He also worked at the University of California at Los Angeles before moving to Australia.

"My research team at Monash is further engineering the architecture of graphene-based materials and exploring them for a variety of applications," he says.