Graphene - breakthrough material, or media hyperbole?
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Physics is not my area of expertise.
However, I saw this article in today's Yahoo! News:
I try to be extra suspicious of science reporting in mainstream journalism because it tends to completely suck and be full of fail. So I did what any good geek would do and checked Wikipedia:
Looks pretty legit.
Physics folks, materials folks, nanotech folks (I'm looking at you, electricitylikesme)... what do you think of this? Is it going to be all it's cracked up to be?
Particularly, what's the production cost right now? A simple Google search for "graphene production cost" produces no useful results - a number of press releases and studies promising new production methods, but no actual numbers. What are the chances of seeing cost-effective mass production in our lifetimes?
However, I saw this article in today's Yahoo! News:
New wonder material, one-atom thick, has scientists abuzz
By Robert S. Boyd, McClatchy Newspapers
Wed Jul 8, 2:47 pm ET
WASHINGTON — Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.
That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.
"It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
"A few grams could cover a football field," said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce.
Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it's as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll.
Graphite, the lead in a pencil, is made of stacks of graphene layers. Although each individual layer is tough, the bonds between them are weak, so they slip off easily and leave a dark mark when you write.
Potential graphene applications include touch screens, solar cells, energy storage devices, cell phones and, eventually, high-speed computer chips.
Replacing silicon, the basic electronic material in computer chips, however, "is a long way off . . . far beyond the horizon," said Geim, who first discovered how to produce graphene five years ago.
"In the near and medium term, it's going to be extremely difficult for graphene to displace silicon as the main material in computer electronics," said Tomas Palacios , a graphene researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . "Silicon is a multi-billion dollar industry that has been perfecting silicon processing for 40 years."
{snipped for length}
I try to be extra suspicious of science reporting in mainstream journalism because it tends to completely suck and be full of fail. So I did what any good geek would do and checked Wikipedia:
Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. It can be viewed as an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. The name comes from GRAPHITE + -ENE; graphite itself consists of many graphene sheets stacked together.
The carbon-carbon bond length in graphene is approximately 0.142 nm. Graphene is the basic structural element of some carbon allotropes including graphite, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. It can also be considered as an infinitely large aromatic molecule, the limiting case of the family of flat polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons called graphenes.
Measurements have shown that graphene has a breaking strength 200 times greater than steel, making it the strongest material ever tested.
...
Intrinsic graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor.
...
Graphene's unique electronic properties produce an unexpectedly high opacity for an atomic monolayer...
Looks pretty legit.
Physics folks, materials folks, nanotech folks (I'm looking at you, electricitylikesme)... what do you think of this? Is it going to be all it's cracked up to be?
Particularly, what's the production cost right now? A simple Google search for "graphene production cost" produces no useful results - a number of press releases and studies promising new production methods, but no actual numbers. What are the chances of seeing cost-effective mass production in our lifetimes?
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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It is safe to forget about it for now.
Oh, hello, Quantum Teleportation! How are you doing? Dead? Oh, so sorry to hear that!
Clearly there's something I'm missing here.
Is it impossible, or just not economically feasible?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Remember about 4-5 years ago when nanotubes were going to be the end all, be all of materials. Yeah, I'm seeing graphene having the same impact on everyday life for a few decades, little to none.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Phase one is figuring out how to make high quality samples
Phase two is seeing if they have the properties we think they do
Phase three is thinking how to convert them into something useful on an industrial scale
Rapid hype and growth (funding ++), then everybody thinks its never going to come (Funding --), and just when everyone least suspects it the technology finally advances exponentially (due generally to private r&d or breakthroughs in other areas of science) and becomes practical.
So basically, if there is hype, its not happening now, it's happening a decade or so from now.
When I read about it last, it was going to revolutionize computers, or information transfer, or something or other. That was the last I'd heard of it, and this was probably five years ago.
This stuff has been going on for about 20 years now. At least. The science folks are really making progress. Hell, there is a university I think in Texas that has made yards of 2 inch wide nanotubes fabric. The stuff is amazing.
If it's anything like producing other fullerenes, laser pulses or applying voltages or whatever vaporizes pretty small amounts of graphite, so it's more about not being able to produce single sheets in useful sizes.
and for the breaking strength- well maybe, but that's like how an ant is 100 times stronger than a human. Yyou can't just scale it up and make super steel, any more than you can create a human-sized ant with 100 times the strength of a human.
Because work continues on the later (A friend of mine is in the group which holds the record for the longest distance over which a quantum key exchange has occurred) and I would imagine it involves the former as it is a rather cool little bit of science.
Huh, cool. I guess it just dropped off the radar after journalists realized that it didn't mean Scotty was going to be beaming us all over the damned galaxy any time soon.
Once they figure out b, we are laughing.
I want my 27" OLED monitor and foldable OLED newspaper!
If it actually goes anywhere, all the better, but I'm a fan of inventing, creating, adapting and imagining for their own sake. Actual productivity is important, but venturing down unknown paths could be one of the most important things we ever do as a species.
On the plus side, now anytime a science fiction story/movie has to explain how some magical future technology works, they can just go "nanotubes."
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
I need to build some more science labs so I can research graphene armor. That +5 to laser resistance is awesome.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Once we've minimized our maintenance costs and eliminated pollution overload, it's a short jump to finishing up a Missile Base, Fighter Garison, Ground Batteries and a Stellar Converter.
Then we can just get to work on fleets and take what we need from lesser races.
Plus it's so thin and flexible, it feels like I'm wearing...
pfft, everyone knows scientists are a waste. Just build autolabs everywhere, and put the scientists to work as laborers. Or kill them and replace them with robots.
Great, now that's going to be in my head all day.
Thanks, KalTorak!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I just might make a very focused animated gif and update my avatar/title all for you! Mine is a bit stale.
Nothin at all
Nothin at all...
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
Fixed that for you.
God, I loved both of those games so much.
We already have those
Graphene and single-walled carbon nanotubes are insane in theory (like 1 TPa tensile strength? Yes please.) There's just no way to reliably manufacture the stuff; searching through soot isn't much fun. I guarantee the person who finds a way to effectively process this material will earn a Nobel Prize. That's the only thing (albeit, a big thing) holding us back from a new wave of materials applications. Maybe not as big as when polymers became widely used, but quite important nonetheless.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
If cheap enough, we could use it for everything from a non-stick coating for pots and pans to the outermost coat of paint on a car.
It's definitely a viable product for countless things to tickle your fancy. Right now, it's one of the most expensive substances in existence at something like $600 per gram. We are messing around with applications using random carbon nanotubes, but when you can't separate the multi-walled from single-walled, the overall tensile strength plummets.
I had a composites class on stuff like this and it was incredibly interesting.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
He can make couple of gram level quantities of the stuff pretty easily, but the main problem is that it's hard to prove he gets single flakes out at the end, and he can't really control where it goes or how big it is.
The best bet for stuff like this in electronics terms is going to be CVD growth methods, since you can mask those onto the substrate you want and then etch/shape them so they fit where you want them too.
Re: nanotubes
The big problem with them at the moment is not only the nanotube purity, but also defects within the tube structure - some calculations reckon you lose upto 30% of the strength from just a single atom point defect in the tube wall, the chance of which occurring gets bigger and bigger the more of them you grow. I saw a presentation by a guy at the CSIRO who was working on spinning nanotubes into thread, and they were surprised at the poor tensile strengths they got (the spinning method should give them something like 80% the theoretical strength of the individual tubes - but they didn't get that).
Also I am shocked and outraged that this thread was 2nd paged!
there's no real difference between the two
are you an engineer?
Let us discuss science.
But yeah, slight defects will seriously screw up your tubes. It's not a big truck, for cryin out loud. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Missing atoms cause stress concentration regions and basically multiply the force on other bonds in that area by a massive amount which leads to failure.
I believe chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is the way they currently make them. It's just that the process is so tediously complex (and expensive) that mass production is still a tube dream. Graphene is just a wall of carbon nanotubes unrolled. I'm not sure if getting them to "connect" lengthwise would be all that easy, depending on your CVD method. It's the goddamn small size of this that's the problem; it's hard enough to see the structure, let alone manipulate it effectively, and to say nothing of doing that billions of times with complete accuracy.
Practical problems.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!