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?

[pushing-robot]

And this stuff and nonsense about aeroplanes! For ten years now they've claimed breakthrough after breakthrough vis-a-vis powered flight and yet here we are in the fine year 1914 and they still have nothing to show us but more of their ramshackle prototypes! Where are the great flying ships they keep promising to take us round the world in a week's time? The bloody Hun had the good sense to invest in dirigibles; there's a technology that's going places—aha!

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

[pushing-robot]

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.

Silica?

[Isomorphic]

One wonders how graphene fares against bullets made from graphene.

Re:sane units - FYI

[pushing-robot]

A Joule is equal to one newton-meter (or metre if you're so inclined). Force times distance.

Foot-pounds are the same: Force times distance (well, distance times force). The confusion comes from pound in this case referring to "pound-force" or lbf, a unit equal to one pound times g.

J/kg is a different measure, the specific kinetic energy of an object; the amount of energy per unit mass. The imperial equivalent would be ft*lbf / lb (foot * pound-force / pound)

Metric: J/kg = N*m/kg = (kg * m/s^2 * m)/kg = m/s^2 * m = m^2/s^2

Imperial: lbf*ft/lb = lb*g*ft/lb = g*ft = ~32.174 * ft/s^2 * ft = ~32.174*ft^2/s^2

As you can see, the choice of g rather than 1 ft/s^2 was unfortunate, but otherwise the systems are equivalent.