Paul A. Advincula | FrogHeart

Asphaltene (or asphaltenes are) is waste material that can be turned into graphene according to scientists at Rice University (Texas, US), from a November 18, 2022 news item on ScienceDaily,

Asphaltenes, a byproduct of crude oil production, are a waste material with potential. Rice University scientists are determined to find it by converting the carbon-rich resource into useful graphene.
Muhammad Rahman, an assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering, is employing Rice’s unique flash Joule heating process to convert asphaltenes instantly into turbostratic (loosely aligned) graphene and mix it into composites for thermal, anti-corrosion and 3D-printing applications.
The process makes good use of material otherwise burned for reuse as fuel or discarded into tailing ponds and landfills. Using at least some of the world’s reserve of more than 1 trillion barrels of asphaltene as a feedstock for graphene would be good for the environment as well.
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A November 17, 2022 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, expands on this exciting news, Note: Links have been removed,

“Asphaltene is a big headache for the oil industry, and I think there will be a lot of interest in this,” said Rahman, who characterized the process as both a scalable and sustainable way to reduce carbon emissions from burning asphaltene.
Rahman is a lead corresponding author of the paper in Science Advances co-led by Rice chemist James Tour, whose lab developed flash Joule heating, materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and Md Golam Kibria, an assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada.
Asphaltenes are 70% to 80% carbon already. The Rice lab combines it with about 20% of carbon black to add conductivity and flashes it with a jolt of electricity, turning it into graphene in less than a second. Other elements in the feedstock, including hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur, are vented away as gases.
“We try to keep the carbon black content as low as possible because we want to maximize the utilization of asphaltene,” Rahman said.
“The government has been putting pressure on the petroleum industries to take care of this,” said Rice graduate student and co-lead author M.A.S.R. Saadi. “There are billions of barrels of asphaltene available, so we began working on this project primarily to see if we could make carbon fiber. That led us to think maybe we should try making graphene with flash Joule heating.”
Assured that Tour’s process worked as well on asphaltene as it did on various other feedstocks, including plastic, electronic waste, tires, coal fly ash and even car parts, the researchers set about making things with their graphene.
Saadi, who works with Rahman and Ajayan, mixed the graphene into composites, and then into polymer inks bound for 3D printers. “We’ve optimized the ink rheology to show that it is printable,” he said, noting the inks have no more than 10% of graphene mixed in. Mechanical testing of printed objects is forthcoming, he said.
Rice graduate student Paul Advincula, a member of the Tour lab, is co-lead author of the paper. Co-authors are Rice graduate students Md Shajedul Hoque Thakur, Ali Khater, Jacob Beckham and Minghe Lou, undergraduate Aasha Zinke and postdoctoral researcher Soumyabrata Roy; research fellow Shabab Saad, alumnus Ali Shayesteh Zeraati, graduate student Shariful Kibria Nabil and postdoctoral associate Md Abdullah Al Bari of the University of Calgary; graduate student Sravani Bheemasetti and Venkataramana Gadhamshetty, an associate professor, at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and its 2D Materials of Biofilm Engineering Science and Technology Center; and research assistant Yiwen Zheng and Aniruddh Vashisth, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, of the University of Washington.
The research was funded by the Alberta Innovates for Carbon Fiber Grand Challenge programs, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-19-1-0296), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (W912HZ-21-2-0050) and the National Science Foundation (1849206, 1920954).

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Sustainable valorization of asphaltenes via flash joule heating by M.A.S.R. Saadi, Paul A. Advincula, Md Shajedul Hoque Thakur, Ali Zein Khater, Shabab Saad, Ali Shayesteh Zeraati, Shariful Kibria Nabil, Aasha Zinke, Soumyabrata Roy, Minghe Lou, Sravani N. Bheemasetti, Md Abdullah Al Bari, Yiwen Zheng, Jacob L. Beckham, Venkataramana Gadhamshetty, Aniruddh Vashisth, Md Golam Kibria, James M. Tour, Pulickel M. Ajayan, and Muhammad M. Rahman. Science Advances 18 Nov 2022 Vol 8, Issue 46 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add3555

This paper is open access.

I’ve become strangely fascinated with concrete these last few months. Possibly, this is a consequence of a lot more ‘concrete’ research being published. Here’s a March 29, 2021 news item on phys.org featuring work from Rice University (Texas, US),

This could be where the rubber truly hits the road.
Rice University scientists have optimized a process to convert waste from rubber tires into graphene that can, in turn, be used to strengthen concrete.
The environmental benefits of adding graphene to concrete are clear, chemist James Tour said.
“Concrete is the most-produced material in the world, and simply making it produces as much as 9% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions,” Tour said. “If we can use less concrete in our roads, buildings and bridges, we can eliminate some of the emissions at the very start.”
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A March 29, 2021 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides context for the work and more technical details,

Recycled tire waste is already used as a component of Portland cement, but graphene has been proven to strengthen cementitious materials, concrete among them, at the molecular level.
While the majority of the 800 million tires discarded annually are burned for fuel or ground up for other applications, 16% of them wind up in landfills.
“Reclaiming even a fraction of those as graphene will keep millions of tires from reaching landfills,” Tour said.
The “flash” process introduced by Tour and his colleagues in 2020 has been used to convert food waste, plastic and other carbon sources by exposing them to a jolt of electricity that removes everything but carbon atoms from the sample.
Those atoms reassemble into valuable turbostratic graphene, which has misaligned layers that are more soluble than graphene produced via exfoliation from graphite. That makes it easier to use in composite materials.
Rubber proved more challenging than food or plastic to turn into graphene, but the lab optimized the process by using commercial pyrolyzed waste rubber from tires. After useful oils are extracted from waste tires, this carbon residue has until now had near-zero value, Tour said.
Tire-derived carbon black or a blend of shredded rubber tires and commercial carbon black can be flashed into graphene. Because turbostratic graphene is soluble, it can easily be added to cement to make more environmentally friendly concrete.
The research led by Tour and Rouzbeh Shahsavari of C-Crete Technologies is detailed in the journal Carbon.
The Rice lab flashed tire-derived carbon black and found about 70% of the material converted to graphene. When flashing shredded rubber tires mixed with plain carbon black to add conductivity, about 47% converted to graphene. Elements besides carbon were vented out for other uses.
The electrical pulses lasted between 300 milliseconds and 1 second. The lab calculated electricity used in the conversion process would cost about $100 per ton of starting carbon.
The researchers blended minute amounts of tire-derived graphene — 0.1 weight/percent (wt%) for tire carbon black and 0.05 wt% for carbon black and shredded tires — with Portland cement and used it to produce concrete cylinders. Tested after curing for seven days, the cylinders showed gains of 30% or more in compressive strength. After 28 days, 0.1 wt% of graphene sufficed to give both products a strength gain of at least 30%.
“This increase in strength is in part due to a seeding effect of 2D graphene for better growth of cement hydrate products, and in part due to a reinforcing effect at later stages,” Shahsavari said.

I’m not sure where I got this stock shot but it is pretty (if tires can ever be described that way).

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Flash Graphene from Rubber Waste by Paul A. Advincula, Duy Xuan Luong, Weiyin Chen, Shivaranjan Raghuraman, Rouzbeh Shahsavari, James M.Tour. Carbon Available online 28 March 2021 In Press, Journal Pre-proof DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2021.03.020

This paper is behind a paywall.

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Turning asphaltene into graphene

Stronger concrete with graphene derived from tires