Data for: Shear-Induced Aggregation: The Achilles' Heel of High- Shear Mixing for Sustainable Graphene Production

The commercial production of pristine graphene at high yields remains a major challenge, limiting its widespread adoption across the range of applications for which it has been considered. Owing to its scalability, liquid-phase exfoliation using high-shear mixers is one of the most widely used techniques for large-scale graphene production in both industrial and academic settings. However, our findings reveal that shear-induced aggregation, an often-overlooked aspect of the high-shear mixing process, which intensifies by increasing the shear rate, drastically reduces the exfoliation yield for producing single- or few-layer graphene. Comparing high-shear mixing with ultrasonication as an alternative exfoliation method, we have found that the applied shear forces by high-shear mixers are markedly less efficient at peeling off individual graphene layers. Although high-shear mixing offers potential advantages in scalability, its poor energy efficiency renders it less viable for commercial production. Additionally, the graphene produced via high-shear mixing is of inferior quality in almost all aspects (e.g., flake size, defect density, and oxygen content) compared to that obtained through ultrasonication. These findings underscore the need to reevaluate high-shear mixing as a sustainable method for the production of single- and few-layered graphene.