Salt impurities make graphite oxide a fire hazard

The video was taken at 1200 fps and plays at 30 fps. Each playback second represents 25 milliseconds in real time.

Self-propagating reactions in a GO film, the right half of which had been contaminated by KOH. Reactions were initiated by a hot soldering iron from the left, untreated side. Exothermic reduction started from the left half and rapidly propagated over the boundary, which then triggered violent combustion in the contaminated area. The bottom half completely burned away while the upper part stayed stable. Scale bar = 5 mm.

For more information, see the paper published in Advanced Functional materials:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123580462/abstract

Materials Views - "Burning Up" by Kitty Cha
http://www.materialsviews.com/details/news/759741/Burning_Up.html

Prof. Jiaxing Huang's Homepage at Northwestern:
http://jxhuang.mccormick.northwestern.edu/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• graphene
• graphene oxide
• Northwestern
• flammability
• NSF
• materials science
• domino-like reactions