It is strong but light, conducts both heat and electricity extremely well and is nearly transparent in its purest form. It is a "wonder material", according to the American Physical Society, "a million times thinner than paper, stronger than diamond, more conductive than copper".

Graphene does occur naturally; the lead in a typical graphite pencil is made up of slippery layers of flat graphene sheets. But making the ultra-pure graphene necessary for future applications has previously been very difficult, particularly if you are trying to suspend the graphene flakes in a liquid - which would be useful to develop spray-on smart coatings.

Essentially, researchers were limited to creating high-quality graphene in small amounts, or lower-quality graphene in larger amounts, but not large amounts of high-quality material.

"The commercial development of graphene and related two-dimensional materials is at present restrained by the lack of production techniques ready for industrial scale-up," James Tour of Rice University in Houston wrote in a commentary on the study.

A team of scientists led out of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland came up with a way to take graphite powder, dump it in a laboratory blender with a surfactant mixture and create pure sheets of graphene at far larger quantities than previous methods, the scientists said. In the future, with scaled-up processes, the production rate could easily be hundreds of times higher than many current outfits.

To test exactly how robust their method was, the scientists also tried the method using a Kenwood kitchen blender and Fairy brand dishwashing fluid and the process still worked.

"This clearly shows that even very crude mixers can produce well-exfoliated graphene," study co-author Jonathan Coleman of Trinity College Dublin and his colleagues wrote in the paper.

Tour, who was not involved in the paper, called the work "a hands-on guide for chemical and materials engineers practitioners to make assessments of cost and efficacy".

The findings are a significant step towards being able to mass produce high-quality graphene, the authors said, which could help spur the development of graphene-related technology.

"In the next decade, graphene will find commercial applications in many areas, from high-frequency electronics to smart coatings," the authors wrote. "Some important classes of applications … will require industrial-scale production of defect-free graphene in a processable form."