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Will Graphene Revolutionize the 21st Century?
An anonymous reader writes "Much has been made of graphene's potential. It can be used for anything from composite materials — like how carbon-fiber is used currently — to electronics. 'Our research establishes Graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,' mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, said in a statement. If graphene can be compared to the way plastic is used today, everything from crisp packets to clothing could be digitized once the technology is established. The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
How does that compare to Adamantium?
wha'? where am i?
Its probably got lots of other great uses, but the one I think of most is that its strong enough to make cables for a space elevator. That alone would be revolutionary.
My guess is it will, unless there's some big flaw found in graphene. Why wouldn't it?
Personally I think there's a lot of potential with it. However, I'm curious if it's going to end up being something like asbestos that makes it a bittersweet kind of substance.
I do think we need something to propel our sciences forward to "the next level (tm)" and graphene just may help get us there.
"The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
So I'll have to wait 5 minutes before my credit card finally has booted?
Privacy is terrorism.
an industrial revolution, by definition, came by things completely unexpected. Laser, silicon, etc. When grapehene can be produced massively it will already be "the Next Big Thing in 5-10 years" for the previous 50 years.
At the end of the article: "But the main thing is to be truthful and not exaggerate because we actually have to deliver." When there are some real-world examples, then graphene will be worth reading about.
Skip Franklin
It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black. -- despair.com
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you - just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: Graphene.
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in graphene. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Graphene has no bandgap, and therefore is not a semiconductor. This means it can't be used to make a transistor. And although it has a good conductivity it does not compare to copper. Although graphene does have some extraordinary properties it will not replace silicon for making processors, or copper for making PCB's.
Don't smartphones already have all their processing power contained inside something smaller than a credit card? The rest is just battery, screen, antenna,...
...because the difference between graphene and graphite is that graphene is one atom thick, bypassing the sheet-on-sheet sliding that makes graphite such a wonderful lubricant. If you want multiple sheets to be used in a material and still have some structural stability, you have to cross-link the atoms, which just gives you diamond (or amorphous carbon, if it's half-assed).
No, if graphene is the material of the 21st century, it will be entirely because of its electronic properties, not the mechanical.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
I personally can't wait for graphene based ultracapacitors. They're reaching capacitances of 100,000 farads/kg in the lab which is just absolutely insane for a capacitor.
I think graphene will probably fulfill some promises and fall flat with others. Since carbon (which graphene is) is a semiconductor I am more hopeful for it to become an efficient electronic resource. Because it is a semiconductor, I am less hopeful that it will become a better battery (carbon has been used in batteries for years but it's electrical leakage eventually drains an unused battery). As a material I expect that it will have the same shortcomings that carbon fiber has - in order to be strongest it needs to be pure which has proven difficult to achieve and therefore expensive. Graphene itself is expensive to manufacture. Is it even possible to chain it together to make long chains of it? I don't know but do know it is hard to do it with carbon fiber. What are the health consequences of making it, using it, or wearing it? So many things seem promising but end up being very bad (asbestos, lead, VOC's) that I am not sure it will launch. Seems like a submicroscopic sharp hard item may cause problems in the lungs.
In your dreams, pal. If it does take over the world and revolutionize technology, we'll know for sure...unless "we" is just a bunch of people who don't know science from apple sauce. But the trouble with just about any technology these days is that environmental activists are going to find a reason why we're supposed to hate it. With anything that's derived from carbon (hey, that's just about everything, isn't it?) that requires lots of combustion and chemical processing, you're going to be on their shit list sooner or later. Best thing to do is find a cave to live in, stick to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and keep a low profile.
Do I remember correctly if I remember a a Slashdot article with a link to a short film of a man pulling graphene from a solid carbon piece, like Scotch tape? At the time I thought it was fake, but as time went I realized it was for real. Graphene is way cool, and would be nice to find and see that clip again!
Wait for the patent trolls to join the party and tell me which century this will revolutionize.
Now I won't be able to figure out my credit card without tech support! Argh ;=p hehe
We are leaving the age of silicon and entering the diamond age. The artifacts we build in the next 1000 years might actually stay around for tens of thousands of years after we are long gone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
Can't you roll up graphene sheets like rolling up a sheet of paper, or multiple sheets of paper? Would you get structural stability that way?
A few years ago all the rage was about carbon nanotubes. An entire generation of phd students was raised on this material. Carbon nanotubes were the material of the future, enabling the space elevator, nanoscale transistors, near-superconductor conductivity and so on. What is left today?
Even before that there were C60 buckyballs, another previously unnoticed carbon allotrope. Buckyballs were set to revolutionize chemistry and were (are) part of n-type organic semicunductors. What is left today?
A fad is a fad, even in science. Of all the imagined applications a few will remain, and will be turned into real applications by technologists and engineers. The scientists will move on to the next fad - well at least those who are quick enough.
...that most of the technologies used in your "self-sustainable" lifestyle are the result of recent developments and investments in new technologies, most of which have been about pushing down the costs of the tech involved.
Your solar array? Only became feasible at the individual installation level in the last five years (and is improving rapidly) due to heavy R&D investment. Ditto that windmill (arguably, that's more about moving the industrial base to China and the associated cost savings - unless you have carbon fiber blades).
And that's ignoring the effect of cheap and powerful computers on design - affordable solid form CAD, FEA, CFD, and ubiquitous CAM means that anybody can buy Solidworks, MasterCAM, and a HAAS 3-axis mill and start making chips at a startup cost that is a tiny fraction of what that capability cost even 10 years ago.
Unless you are mining your own ore, smelting your own raw materials, logging your own trees, growing your own seed (and your own fertilizer) your are as much a part of "the system" as the rest of us; a couple of solar panels be dammed.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Within say 10-20 years most of Norway will have fiber everywhere - 12% had it last year and they're wiring all over the place, I heard some claim 35% by 2015 though that sounded a bit optimistic. No more last mile problems, you could send gigabits to every house. HDTV streaming to every room in the building @ BluRay quality? Can do. Webcams the quality of full HD video cameras? Can do. High quality multi-channel video conferencing? Can do. The future is a world where bandwidth is truly approaching almost free. CPUs and GPUs will improve some yes, but I think that's what will change the most. Oh and with it massive deployment of wireless, if every home has a fiber connection they probably won't mind a 50 Mbit wireless running on the side - not just 4G but massive bandwidth in almost all populated areas. Fast enough you could literally have every change on your hdd synced against remote backup - or even that the network acts as your local hdd. Where the data is will almost cease to be relevant, the pipes are so vast it doesn't matter.
And hopefully we'll see the end of "TV networks" and regional restrictions as we know it. Series just go live and people get it via iTunes/Spotify/Netflix like services, there's no need for scheduled programming because the bandwidth is so vast we can just unicast to everyone and let them watch it at their own pace, possibly with some preloads and CDN to avoid the pressure on the underwater cables and the peaks but mostly that the massive bandwidth means it's no big deal. That storm is coming, it's the same as over CD vs digital downloads only you need way more bandwidth. And that is coming, well except maybe to the US but I'm sure you'll be dragged along in time.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I mean I know carbon in SP3 hybridization is a non-conductor(think diamond) but graphene/graphite is SP2. It's a conductor because of that electron sharing. (Hey, I still remember a little of my organic chemistry.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -- Robert X. Cringley
Can't you roll up graphene sheets like rolling up a sheet of paper, or multiple sheets of paper?
Yes, that would be carbon nano-tubes. However last time we played around with tiny incredible strong tubes that didn't turn out to well. Have to wait and see how things work out for carbon nanotubes.
You would get some, but then what you have is essentially a multi-walled carbon nanotube, only with a lot more give to it.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
A rolled up graphene sheet = Carbon nanotube.
Yes they are structurally strong, but they have a tiny radius (nm's).
There's also this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/04/020429072519.htm
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My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
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Abalone shells manage to be incredibly tough by bonding layers of hard plates between flexible ones. A composite of sheets of graphene and noncarbon atomic layers binding them sounds interesting. I wouldn't be astonished if someone made a superconductor that way.
Current carbon fiber gets its strength from carbon "lamellae" which are a micostructural feature of the fiber itself. That is, inside the fiber are regions that are amorphous carbon and regions that are organized into sheets. If you wanted to make a structural material using graphene sheets this might be what you would do. But we already have it. So why isn't it taking over the world?
Beware of grandiose claims about strength. You could accurately say current carbon fiber is 10 times stronger than steel, but you don't see any real-world things made out of cfrp that are 10 times stronger than an equivalent steel part even on a weight basis. That's because going from microstructure to macro-structure is a long and winding road and includes also the weakest parts, not just the strongest parts that everyone likes to talk about.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Forget Adamantium, what about Unobtanium?
Dr Michio Kaku raves about graphene a lot.. He did mention using it to make a Dyson phere (of the capture all the energy of the sun kind, not necessarily the live on like Shaw's Orbitsville kind.
Aren't we getting tired of hearing about "the future" yet?
The article cited a lot of facts, theory and experimental work being done, but not one item about a physical product used in production.
"Will Graphene Revolutionize the 21st Century?": The answer is cost effective applications of graphene will be the sole determinant.
The game is called "The Cynic's 4 Color Puzzle".
1. Obtain an outline map of the world, preferably black and white.
2. Select four colors. 1, 2, 3, and 4.
3. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be nigh-unimaginably futuristic(routine occurrence of transhumans, strong AIs, kilometer high metamaterial structures, etc.) in 2061 with color 1.
4. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be surprisingly mundane in 2061, except for a few of those wacky details that futurists never get right(everybody is still working in cubicles and flying aging 787s; but something as unexpected as facebook would have been in 1950 occupies 30% of the cube-dweller's time), with color 2.
5. Fill all areas of the world that will still be "developing" in 2061(the local elites will have access to everything from the color 2 zones, and color 1s, if present; but the bulk of the populace will still be mired in such classics as mud farming, Kalashnikovs, and nokias) with color 3.
6. Fill all areas of the world that will be radically dystopian and/or uninhabitable for cool reasons(radical climate shifts/flooding, nanite plague, biotech advances make new strains of smallpox and anthrax and friends as common as new malware is today, etc.) with color 4.
7. Argue at length about one another's maps.
Would you have to cross link atoms if you wanted only traction resistance? A graphene cable would be awesome.
There was a revolution when we added "plastic" to our list of building materials. It's cheap and can be easily molded into complex shapes at a very low cost. Don't worry about fossil fuels for the raw materials, we've already begun making plastics from plants. Plastic is here to stay.
Will graphene revolutionize the 21st century? Probably, but only in some domains. It has the potential to replace silicium for building faster processors and higher density solid-state memory, it's already revolutionized building materials if you're not afraid of the high cost and long manufacturing process.
But there's something else that's quite interesting: liquid metal (the real thing, not the T-1000 kind) allow us to mold metal at a very low cost like plastic. That's going to be a revolution in itself.
A rolled up graphene sheet =! Carbon nanotube.
A rolled up metal sheet =! metal (nano)tube.
A rolled up sponge cake sheet(with filling) = Swiss roll
Literally. Pencil lead!
8)
(stolen from DaBum) I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
I wish future could see smartphones that cost less than my credit card contains.
Only if you get it from Monster Cables!
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What's the largest faultless 1-atom-thick graphene sheet they've created so far? And by faultless, I mean absolutely perfect with no imperfections, because any tiny holes (or cracks or whatever) in the graphene reduce the strength many-fold.
I heard they created a 1cm square, but I don't think it was faultless.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
"According to the Nobel prize committee, a hypothetical one-metre-square hammock of perfect graphene could support a four-kilogram cat - the hammock would weigh 0.77 milligrams, less than a cat's whisker, and would be virtually invisible." - Richard Van Noorden, Nature Magazine
I'm glad that someone is addressing the need for invisible cat hammocks. FINALLY!
I'm all for giving credit to Nokia on this, because they really did invent all the major components of a modern cell phone. But Benoit Mandelbrot deserves a shout-out. Before he started blowin' minds with fractals, nobody would have thought to fold a foot long antenna into a one inch square.
Then so do desktops. Your CPU is not very big. A Core i7-2600k is just 38x38mm. That is for the actual package the chip is in, the silicon chip itself is smaller. However ti does require a fair bit of support hardware to do its thing.
Same shit with a smart phone. Yes the actual CPU is quite small. However it does need its support hardware, including a reasonable battery, to do its thing. You couldn't pack it all in a credit card and have it function.
The article makes a rudimentary statement about graphene and fails to acknowledge that it is a conductor and not a semiconductor. That limits some of its use without using it in a complex composite to create a limited semiconductor material. As it stands now though graphene would be excellent for power transfer and screen technology. I think it will certainly establish a change in the way technology is used as chips grow smaller and screens grow larger and more flexible. We could see folding screens in a few years which would be an amazing improvement over our current systems. Laptops could be equipped with unfolding screens. Smartphones could so the same. Home theaters could become portable in a quite interesting and unique way.
In other words, it will revolutionize the 21st century as our viewing technology makes a giant leap forward but silicon is going to be the dominant semiconductor for atleast the next decade or so while they work out a graphene composite that can cut some of its conductor properties. But graphene could be the answer to the wall viewers, curved displays, and other super-sized designs.
Specifically, from "Paradise Lost"...
APK
A mechanical engineer should know that most structures fail due to buckling, not a lack of tensile strength.
That L ^2 term in the denominator bites hard.
http://www.efunda.com/formulae/solid_mechanics/columns/columns.cfm
If the body transports graphene molecules in the same manner as minerals like zinc and magnesium, then graphene is not safe and could cause any type of degenerative disease including cancer. Better check first.
The first fractal antennas were invented in the 1950's, long before Mandelbrot turned self-similarity into fractional dimensionality. The particular antenna I'm talking about is the log-periodic.
Also, Nokia didn't invent the concept of fractal antennas; Nathan Cohen did, in 1988.
fyngyrz, posting anon consequent to slashdot's cowardly mechanism for moderators.
That would give you carbon nanotubes if I'm not mistaken. So, the answer to your question should be yes.
What about boots? Can we have boots in the future which have a 5 minute boot time to boot up?
You mean, like nanotubes?
If the structure's in tension, buckling usually isn't an issue. Weird cases like this nothwithstanding.
Nanotube technology is by far the most promising material ever known to man. We can already program DNA to organize the growth of graphene into electrical circuits, grown from the bottom up. It has a tensile strength 10,000x more than Steel. It can have amazingly high and low thermal conductivity coefficients, based on its grain. Add it to concrete as a replacement for rebar.
This isn't just a possibility of changing our lives, it already changing our lives. Our materials SUCK right now and this supermaterial could save our asses as a race.
What the fuck does =! mean?
Then we have a revolution.
Till the common Maker can fill in his credit card number and gets some of this stuff... ..nothing exciting is going to happen.
and will I need a battery pack as well?
Nope, but you'll need to recharge you CC... on the grid... you know? Super-capacitors made of graphene.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
welcome our graphene overlords
It is not quite strong enough for a strand of it to support itself out to geostationary and beyond. The space elevator fans need to keep looking at other similar emerging materials.
Dreaming is cool. Pretending the dream is real here and now is not.
I'm sorry but it does not work that way, as you will see if you attempt to slide up a rope. It's a bit sad to have something like that after a line like "Wow, you really don't know much, do you?"
If it's possible when new materials stronger than graphene become available the energy savings will be due to being able to use more efficient methods to reach orbit than throwing gas out the back. You still need to put in some work to get out there because gravity exists and even if you have a counterweight going down while you go up there are still losses - vastly better than a rocket but you cannot just put a ring on the cable and watch it vanish into the heavens by magic.
I thinks he meant !=.
Means not equal.
So let me get this right ... graphene is lasagna, and nanotubes are cannelloni?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
Heaven help us. Then literally nothing will work anymore. I shudder every time I use a "smart" appliance. To me, a "smart" appliance - one with an embedded computer - is something that needs occasional reboots, contains concurrency bugs and therefore gets into undefined states ("frozen"), second guess incorrectly about what I want it to do, needs to be recharged and have its batteries replaced, is vulnerable to hacking, needs continual updates, needs to be "managed" in various ways, and is generally not reliable enough to trust. Smart appliances make life miserable. Unless we can radically change the way that we program these things, to alleviate these ills, a world in which everything is a "smart" appliance is a frustrating world in which nothing works anymore.
Strongly equals!
Sorry, but that is what you have to do before handing out insults. It isn't hard once you get your head around the frame of reference. But once again you've forgotten it's not enough to exceed gravity when you are on the ground.
Exactly - please take another look at your books instead of just assuming it works like magic.
Now you are just building a strawman. No need to have some mindless lashing about, just read the fucking high school textbooks or wikipedia and remember that gravity exists and opposes the outward force and the outward force does not exceed it until you get very high up. You can't "pull up from above" until you have used some other means to get a lot of mass up there and you and can't keep on moving the mass furthur and furthur out without making sure that the centre of mass is in geostationary orbit.
Why do you think I do not? I've had a few attempts to explain it to you after all and why the "no fuel expended" dream of an Indian rope trick going into the sky by magic doesn't happen. There are only two forces to consider in a simple model of a beanstalk and you forgot the one that makes the idea necessary in the first place - gravity. You have to expend energy to get things up there, but the dream exists because it should be a vast amount less energy expended to lift things up a constructed beanstalk than sending up rockets.
Take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Then scroll down to "Apparent gravitational field" which deals with the acceleration on an object along the line of the beanstalk.
Sorry to burst the other bubble but if you scroll down to the bit about cable material you'll see we need to find something three times as strong as graphene. That just means we can't build it now. It may not be long before other materials are found so that doesn't mean that it is impossible.