Fish waste will allow us to have cheaper QLED screens

I have been wanting to publish an article with this title all my life, today the time has come after reading the conclusions reached by Scientists from the Nagoya Institute of Technology, in Japan.

The fact is that they have developed a method capable of converting fish waste into carbon nano-onions (CNOS) of very high quality, and that can be used to create new LED lighting systems and cheaper QLED screens.

In the article they are quite optimistic, since it is not easy to find CNOs. They are a form of carbon-based nanomaterial with low toxicity, chemical stability, and excellent electrical, thermal, and optical properties, with a high surface area.

CNOS were first discovered in the 1980s, and making them requires high-temperature or vacuum conditions, others take an enormous amount of time, which is not sustainable.

The new method is simple, does not have as many requirements, and uses fish waste as a raw material, since it converts the scales into CNO in 10 seconds using microwave pyrolysis.

Interestingly, they don’t yet understand why fish scales can be converted so easily to CNO, but they believe that the collagen in the scales absorbs enough microwave radiation to produce a rapid rise in temperature, which helps with the process. .

No extreme temperatures, no complex catalysts, and the result has such high crystallinity that it also has great optical properties:

CNOs exhibit ultra-bright visible light emission with an efficiency (or quantum yield) of 40 percent. This value, which has never been achieved before, is about 10-fold higher than that of previously reported CNOs synthesized via conventional methods.

They have already used them in LEDs and thin films that emit blue light, and they believe they will be able to create large-area emissive flexible films, paving the way for next-generation displays.