Green-Extraction of Graphene from Natural Mineral Shungite

With the increasing demand for graphene, the need for a simple, fast, efficient, low-stage and environmentally safe method of its production also increases. In our work, we used physical ultrasound treatment without the addition of surfactants to extract graphene films from a mineral of shungite. From our study of the structures of the resulting graphene, we see that they have the form of films with a surface length of 200 nm with a graphene structure with a hexagonal center and a lattice pitch of 0.335 nm. We investigated two regions of shungite, as illustrated in Figure 1a,d, and conducted EDS analysis on each region. Our results indicate that the completely dark areas in region 1 (Fig. 1b) and 21 (Fig. 1e) are composed entirely of carbon. Conversely, region 2 (Fig. 1c) and 21 (Fig. 1f) is composed of carbon containing impurities, including low concentrations of oxygen, silicon, aluminum, nickel, iron, and vanadium.