A team of researchers from the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), Instituto Superior Técnico, developed a process to fabricate free-standing graphene using plasma technology, at much lower production cost than the other existing market solutions. The invention was granted the first international patent on the “Process, reactor and system for fabrication of free-standing two-dimensional nanostructures using plasma technology” (ref. US 11254575B2), by the US Patent Office.

The patent is an outcome of PEGASUS (Plasma Enabled and Graphene Allowed Synthesis of Unique nanoStructures) project, which also received 3 national patents.

According to Elena Tatarova, principal investigator of the project, “the invention aims at graphene users and consumers developing new products and devices, for applications as varied as energy storage and conversion devices – e.g., electrodes for supercapacitors, or AC filtering lines – but also materials for hydrogen streams purification and storage, composite materials or jet inks”.

The other authors of the invention are the researchers Júlio Henriques, Luís Lemos Alves and Bruno Gonçalves, from IPFN.

PEGASUS prototype developed at IPFN /Instituto Superior Técnico (video).