Graphene has a multitude of striking properties that make it an exceedingly attractive material for various applications, many of which will emerge over the next decade. However, one of the most promising applications lie in exploiting its peculiar electronic properties which are governed by its electrons obeying a 2 linear dispersion relation. This leads to the observation of half integer quantum hall effect and the absence of localization. The latter is attractive for graphene-based field effect transistors.However, if graphene is to be the material for future electronics, then significant hurdles need to be surmounted, namely, it needs to be mass produced in an economically viable manner and be of high crystalline quality with no or virtually no defects or grains boundaries.Moreover, it will need to be processable with atomic precision. Hence, the future of graphene as a material for electronic based devices will depend heavily on our ability to piece graphene together as a single crystal and define its edges with atomic precision. In this progress report, the properties of graphene that make it so attractive as a material for electronics is introduced to the reader. The focus then centers on current synthesis strategies for graphene and their weaknesses in terms of electronics applications are highlighted.

We developed a multiscale approach to explore the effective thermal conductivity of polycrystalline graphene sheets. By performing equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD) simulations, the grain size effect on the thermal conductivity of ultra-fine grained polycrystalline graphene sheets is investigated. Our results reveal that the ultra-fine grained graphene structures have thermal conductivity one order of magnitude smaller than that of pristine graphene. Based on the information provided by the EMD simulations, we constructed finite element models of polycrystalline graphene sheets to probe the thermal conductivity of samples with larger grain sizes. Using the developed multiscale approach, we also investigated the effects of grain size distribution and thermal conductivity of grains on the effective thermal conductivity of polycrystalline graphene. The proposed multiscale approach on the basis of molecular dynamics and finite element methods could be used to evaluate the effective thermal conductivity of polycrystalline graphene and other 2D structures.

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