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Graphene May Top Kevlar As a Bullet-Stopping Material
The Royal Society of Chemistry reports that U.S. researchers Edwin Thomas and Jae-Hwang Lee have been testing the strength of graphene mesh in one role it's probably destined to appear in down the road: as ballistic shielding material. From the article: We cannot use conventional techniques such as a gun barrel or gunpowder [on this scale],’ explains Lee. ‘Instead we used a laser to accelerate a microscale silica bullet [at the multilayer graphene target].’
The bullet was propelled into stacked graphene sheets at supersonic speeds of up to 2000mph by the gases produced by laser pulses rapidly evaporating a gold film. The team calculated the energy difference of the bullet before and after to determine the energy absorbed.
Neil Bourne, director of the National Centre for Matter under Extreme Conditions in the UK, who was not involved in the research, described the technique as ‘very exciting’. ‘They have taken a standard laboratory ballistics configuration and demonstrated its utility on microscopic scales,’ he says.
Graphene was able to absorb up to 0.92MJ/kg of ballistic energy in the test, with cracks forming around the impact zone. By comparison, steel targets only absorbed up to 0.08MJ/kg at the same speed.
There are a hundred steps in between the lab and the open market. You need a lot of funding, development and approval of patents, the approval from applicable government agencies, prototyping, mass production, marketing, and then if all that is successful, market penetration. This doesn't happen in a year. Hopefully it's highly profitable too, or its time on the market will be short-lived.
You want to make something out of (name any substance)? There are only a few special cases where any government approval is required, and patents are NEVER required.
If you want any capital to operate with, you need security in the profitability of producing it. Patents are this security, and so are always necessary unless you want to throw money away. So no, you don't want to leave out steps that will quickly leave your company bankrupt. And all business sectors have codes, standards, and regulations by which you need to abide.
Yes, but airplanes were no more than experiments until more than a decade after the first powered flight, when WWI spurred refinement and mass production. Graphene has also been displayed and demonstrated, but not mass produced.
2D structures like Graphene are a new class of materials, and that takes time. Plastics were discovered decades before any practical product was made. Petroleum was known for millenia before we had a clue what it was capable of. Metals too. Spend some time on Wikipedia and learn how long it took to bring any material or technology to widespread use.
Yes, I know: We live in the Internet age now, and you can become a YouTube celebrity overnight, so come on already. Alas, you can't expect science to keep pace with 21st century ADHD.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
10 years ago they had been saying 10 years already.
We seem to have come to the root of the problem. When they say, "at least 10 years" and establish a minimum bound, you hear "10 years" and take it is a maximum.
R&D people do not promise to turn new technologies into products inside of a fixed time period. And when the say "at least 10 years" they're establishing a precision of a decade. It isn't a prediction at all, but if you wanted to translate it into one it would be something like "10-30 years" not "within 10 years."