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.

Comments

for all this talk... where is it?

[Karmashock]

Every day I'm seeing something about how they can pump the stuff out of a damn DVD burner and how it is great at being a capacitor and all this other stuff.

And yet nothing that contains this technology.

WHY?

It is really fucking annoying to be told all these things are happening and then have no way to access any of it.

Re:for all this talk... where is it?

[Your.Master]

Manufacturing at scale is a big problem

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files...

The stuff is still monumentally more expensive than its competition, even with the price dropping fast, because it's new and we haven't figured out how to scale it yet. The stuff coming out of your dvd burner is not the high quality stuff, and low quality graphene is worse than non-graphene alternatives at most things.

Its use in electronics is also inhibited by the lack of bandgap, which people are looking into: http://physicsworld.com/cws/ar.... It's just another material, and pricing will dictate its use vs. less effective but still perfectly viable alternatives. While its new, this has an odd chicken-and-egg supply-and-demand relationship.

Silica?

[Isomorphic]

One wonders how graphene fares against bullets made from graphene.

Re:Silica?

[Aighearach]

Graphene has a lot of strength in a sheet, but it is soft and floppy. A graphene bullet would just be a carbon bullet. A graphene-coated bullet would be similar to a teflon coated bullet, but not as good and a lot more expensive.

Graphene: easy to use, hard to produce

[tulcod]

Essentially, right now it is really really difficult to work with graphene on an industrial scale.

If you want to work with it in the lab, you get yourself some graphite (essentially pencil lead), some scotch tape, some solvents and you're done. It is dirt cheap and, given a good microscope and a steady hand, not too difficult to work with.

But of course this is no way to work with it on any larger scale. You want to be able to produce a certain amount of it, reliably and precisely. No flaws in the graphene crystal. No multi-layer graphene (which in fact is one of the toughest things to avoid).

This is all really difficult right now.

The situation was similar for transistors, if you recall: the first solid-state transistor was invented in 1947 (by 1956 Nobel prize winners John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley), but it took until the 1960s for ICs to take off (Jack Kilby, 2000 Nobel prize winner, is usually pointed out as the culprit). It took until 2004 (!) for the first single-layer graphene to be isolated (by 2010 Nobel prize winners Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov). So expect the first industrial application of graphene somewhere around the end of this decade, and some patent wars around 2019-2025, and then a Nobel prize for the inventor of whatever industrial process we will be using, around 2040.