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MIT Working On Industrial-Scale Graphene Printing Press
surewouldoutlaw writes "Hot on the heels of news that research into graphene is being funded by the NSF, MIT says it is working on an industrial-size graphene printing press for synthesizing sheets as large as 1-km square. The current record is 76 cm sq. Tomas Palacios, director of the Center for Graphene Devices and Systems, said, 'The way I approach graphene is different from most other researchers in this field. Ninety-nine percent of the papers on graphene have been written by physicists, focusing on amazing and unique properties of the material. I have the point of view of an engineer. I’m interested in finding the best applications for graphene’s unique properties.'"
3M doesn't make Scotch Tape (TM) that big.
"Oh, they've printed him in carbonite! That should preserve him, if he can survive the rollers."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bistromath.
Good thing it's someone else's problem.
Stocking single ply wasn't enough for them? Now they need to go to single atom? And people wonder why I don't poop in public restrooms....
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
I suspect he means one square kilometer, not one kilometer square. I know paper is generally made in very large rolls, and I would expect the engineer to try to replicate that method with the new material.
They want to produce rolls of the stuff. Sure, 1 square kilometer of material could be 1km * 1km, or 10km * 100m, or 100km * 10m, but it's more likely to be a strip 1,000km * 1m, or 10,000km * 10cm than 1km * 1km ...
It's also 1m x 1,000,000 m, i.e. a giant roll.
While I initially thought the same as you, I have to image this is what they're after as a square strikes me as not only impractical but also rather useless.
Using the wikipedia statement that "a stack of three million sheets would be only one millimeter thick" and a handy online rolled material calculator (using 1.5 inch center diameter and 6 inch outer diameter) you get ~32,000 miles!!!
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
The devil is in the details.
Getting the graphene sheet to properly seal in such a perfectly uniform way without disrupting the orderliness of the parent sheet in the process would be a pretty fancy trick.
Developing sheets is fairly easy, as they can be produced using ordinary vapor deposition.
Rolling up that sheet into uniform and regular tubes is a whole different kettle of fish.
Giant?
Graphene is significantly less than a nanometer thick. A million layers of that is still only a millimeter.
This "giant roll" could have the diameter of a roll of toilet paper. If the cardboard tube is a decimeter across.
I know it's being pedantic but I would agree with him.
1 square kilometer is L x W = 1km^2.
1 kilometer square is 1km x 1km.
The difference is one of manufacturing process.
A graphene sheet could arguably be created using vapor deposition and big ass hydraulic press rollers. (Regularity and uniformity of the carbon lattice might be an issue at such thin material scales.)
A nanotube making machine that makes use of sheet stock would need to have:
1) very high quality sheet stock, free from any defects.
2) be able to cut this sheet into a thin (12 to 20 atoms wide) strip, and then seamlessly curl this molecular width sheet into a tube with exacting precision, and then apply some form of energy to bind the sheet edges together seamlessly, and without disrupting the configuration of the other carbon atoms in the tube wall.
That is a helluva lot of caveats to industrual long tube synth from sheet stock.
More likely, the graphene sheets will be used in aviation as prepreg material for strong and light skins for high velocity craft, like fighter jets.
Ugh, the level to which this has been mis-quoted shows a lack of understanding by the TPM authors bordering on idiocy.
The previously made sheet of graphene was cited to be 76 centimeters square. but the original article http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/June/20061001.asp notes that the sheet was 76 Centimeters on the diagonal which would be 54 centimeters on a side if it was a perfect square: 2916 square centimeters.
So if we were to use their own retarded logic system, the claim of attempting a sheet that was one kilometer square, that would actually mean one kilometer on the diagonal. so a centimeter wide and just under a kilometer long would suffice to satisfy the claim.
>> One square kilometer
That's just a back-of-a-cocktail-bedsheet calculation.