REVISTA DYNA NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Also around that time, in this section of Engineering News (see https://www.revistadyna.com/noticias-de-ingenieria/grafeno-barato-y-abundante) we reported how, by applying a process called Flash-Joule to any type of carbonaceous material, it was possible to obtain a cheap and abundant graphene, perhaps not totally identical to strict graphene but sufficiently useful for many industrial uses: flash or turbo-static graphene. It was published in Nature Catalysis (Gram-scale bottom-up flash graphene synthesis) and its authors were researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
The Flash-Joule process is based on applying a potential difference to a body or mixture of solid particles of that body in such a way that it is able to circulate a current through that medium, of sufficient intensity to reach temperatures (Joule effect) of up to thousands of degrees in a time of up to 10 seconds: Rice University has published numerous papers based on this process.
The latest of these, Synthesis of Clean Hydrogen Gas from Waste Plastic at Zero Net Cost, published in Advanced Materials on September, targets both products: on the one hand, hydrogen, for application as an energy vector, and on the other, graphene, in its flash or turbo-static form. At the same time, the use of plastic waste as a base material contributes to the elimination and utilisation of waste which is a major global problem, since only a small proportion of it is recycled or can be recycled.
On the other hand, 95% of the hydrogen produced today is made by reforming natural gas, emitting 11 T of CO2 per 1T of hydrogen. If it were done by electrolysis of water, the cost would be 2 to 3 times higher and this process, although more expensive than reforming, would be compensated by the production of graphene at a lower price. The tests have been carried out by treating plastic loads for 4 seconds at 3,100ºK, and taking into account that, for example, polyethylene contains 86% carbon and 14% hydrogen, it has been found possible to recover up to 68% of this hydrogen with 94% purity.