Graphene and Climate Change. Really?

right no no I'd say three four five six graphing [Music] hello welcome to just ever think yes this is indeed a graphene molecule well this isn't a graphing molecule it's a plastic model but it represents a graphene molecule anyway this is a carbon atom and this here is a covalent bond which is something I'll probably refer to a bit later on so keep that in mind and this is how you actually make graphene it's very simple you take a lump of graphite like that and using ordinary common or garden household tape or in this instance masking tape so you can see a bit better you simply apply the tape to the lump of graphite making sure that you get it nice and nice and packed down there to get a good adhesion and once you're happy with that all you do is simply remove the tape from the graphite and there you have a pristine layer of graphene not actually quite sure what you do with it after that that's why I haven't got a Nobel Prize in Physics these two blokes do though this is Sir Andrei game and so constantina novoselov back in 2004 these two were messing around with pyrolytic graphite at Manchester University and they found that you could indeed use household add hesitate to strip a layer of material just a single atom thick from the graphite block so what makes this graphene stuff so special in well as I've mentioned many times on this channel I am most certainly not a scientist so what follows is a layman's attempt of trying to understand some pretty funky science so if you're doing graphene in science at school or college then make sure you read the comments in the section below after the video or better still maybe go and have a look at a proper science channel just to be on the safe side anyway this is a carbon atom as I mentioned before and these atoms are held together by these covalent bonds which is this grey bit here covalent means that each atom shares a pair of electrons I know I can feel the blackboard coming on are there it is so all these atoms are joined together in this hexagon lattice that really is only one atom thick which if you've got a ruler handy is not 0.35 billionths of a meter or not 0.35 nanometers to use the correct lingo so a single gram of graphene could cover an area of two thousand six hundred and thirty square meters which is the size of ten doubles tennis courts one gram effectively graphene is a two-dimensional material not a three-dimensional material which means it's the thinnest substance ever made but because each atom shares a pair of electrons with other atoms via this covalent bond it makes that bond extremely strong actually even that explanation is apparently too simplistic as well in reality there's all sorts of other things going on in here like electrostatic forces s py px orbitals and Sigma bonds PI bonds Sigma Sigma bonds and pi PI bonds all of that is well over my head and outside the scope of this little video but you can read all about it at Wikipedia or websites like Stock Exchange comm so if you want to delve a little bit more into it then you know knock yourself out anyway all that stuff makes a graphene 200 times stronger than steel a square meter of graphene weighing just naught point naught naught set in seven grams can support four kilograms and the magic doesn't stop there oh no graphene is also harder than diamond but extremely flexible it can be stretched by 20% it's self-healing in its purest form it's 97.7% transparent it's more electrically conductive than copper it's chemically inert and practically impermeable and it can be folded and crumpled anywhere you like which vastly increases its surface area in a confined space in fact short of making you a cup of tea in the morning that doesn't seem to be much this stuff can't though there's just been one slight snag which is that no one has yet managed to manufacture graphene on anything like what you might call an industrial scale in fact it's proved to be a very difficult and expensive thing to make in any kind of volume at all until fairly recently that is following the very best traditions of the human approach to problem solving during the course of our existence on this planet it was of course only a matter of time before one group of people decided to see if they could make more graphene more quickly by blowing stuff up and remarkably enough turns out they could back at the beginning of 2017 a team from Kansas State University took a spark plug from a car and installed it inside a blast proof chamber then they filled the chamber with acetylene gas and oxygen which is combustible then they sealed it all up and put a spark across the plug now that did cause a bit of a bang which I can imagine it was jolly exciting but there was some method in their madness because acetylene and actually ethylene which would have work just as well are composed of hydrogen and carbon so once all the hydrogen has been used up in an explosion you are left with carbon that's able to bond with itself and it does that in a way that forms graphing obviously not in Nice sheets of material but certainly in relatively large quantities compared to what's been achieved previously so at least a step in the right direction and then there's a team from MIT who announced back in April of 2018 that they've developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene the researchers found that they were able to feed the foil continuously through the system producing high-quality graphene at a rate of 5 centimeters a minute John Hart is associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the laboratory of manufacturing and productivity MIT if this were in a factory it'll be running 24/7 art says you'd have big spools of foil feeding through like a printing press so what's all that got to do with climate change and sustainable energy well there's no doubt that if graphene manufacturing can be scaled up and the cost can come tumbling down which is starting to look entirely feasible then we may start to get some things going on at a global level that are actually beneficial to humankind so here are just four ways that graphene could directly contribute towards a better and more sustainable future for all of us number one concrete concrete is now a completely ubiquitous building material used all over the world but it's the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide after fossil fuel and land use change for every ton of cement produced you get one and a quarter tonnes of co2 floating up into the atmosphere so anything that can be done to reduce this has to be a good thing according to researchers at Exeter University graphene can double the strength of standard concrete and increase its water resistance by four times potentially that could have the amount of cement being produced for concrete with the consequent reduction in co2 emissions Exeter University nanoscience and nanotechnology professor Monica crass Ian told new civil engineer how the technique could reduce carbon emissions from concrete by around four hundred and forty six kilograms per tonne calling it a game-changer for the construction industry crash Ian's said the team's working towards securing a new British standard for the concrete which should be ready for commercialized production by the end of 2019 number two is clean water according to the United Nations water scarcity already affects more than 40 percent of the global population and it's a situation that's getting worse as each year passes desalination of seawater can produce fresh drinking water but the process of reverse osmosis that's currently used is extremely expensive and massively energy-hungry several academic institutions around the world are working on graphene based filters as an alternative to this costly process the beauty of graphene is that its structure is tightly packed enough then it can allow water through while filtering out the salt at the University of Manchester in the UK G ro Abraham explains the developed membranes are not only useful for desalination but the atomic scale tune ability of the pore size also opens new opportunities to fabricate membranes with on-demand filtration capability of filtering out ions according to their size MIT researchers have found that water permeability of graphene is many tens of times higher than conventional reverse osmosis membranes and in our 2018 study researchers with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or CSIRO used a form of graphene called graph air to make the sea water drinkable after a single treatment researchers from University in the University of Kentucky have developed graphene filters that can filter out anything larger than one nanometer they say their filters could be used to filter chemicals viruses or bacteria from a range of liquids number three is energy generation this is where graphene may really excel because so many of its properties including electrical conductivity will come in useful in this arena for a star graphene can be used to make more versatile solar panels the best photovoltaic panels available today are about 20 to 25 percent efficient but scientists have found the graphene absorbs photons from a wider spectrum of sunlight and these absorb photons produced multiple electrons and that apparently means a potential efficiency of more like 60% researchers at MIT have stated the ability to use graphene is making possible truly flexible low-cost transparent solar cells that can turn virtually any surface into a source of electrical power once you've produced all that lovely electrical energy of course you have to use it immediately or you have to find some way of storing it which brings us nicely to number four which is energy storage there's a great piece about electricity storage at the skeptical science website written by Ray doner back in 2015 even back then Rodina was telling us graphene has already been used to vastly improve the recharge time reportedly 15 minutes and increase the capacity by as much as 10 times of lithium batteries super capacitors and super capacitor battery hybrids UCLA researchers have developed a new graphene based material called holy graphene enabling production of a capacitor that has unparalleled energy density ten times that of currently available super capacitors and in a report published just a couple of weeks ago in January 2019 the website graphene infocom featured another group called sans on carbon who are developing a graphene gel saltwater battery according to the report batteries based on this technology should charge faster run longer and theoretically may last indefinitely the project's long-term goal is to have a series of three full production batteries ready for launch in spring of 2020 and graphene's getting some serious backing now back in 2013 the European Union set up the graphene flagship which aims to be a center of excellence for the development of graphene and all its various applications at their website graphene - flagship tu they explain the graphene flagship is a future and emerging technology flagship by the european commission with a budget of a 1 billion euros the graphene flagship represents a new form of joint coordinated research on an unprecedented scale forming Europe's biggest ever research initiative it's a great example of a continent scale initiative aimed at continent scale or even global scale solutions to the challenges we'll face as we go through the 21st century and it law has certainly helped with the implementation of the distributed smart electrical grid that's being rolled out across the European mainland and that's already revolutionising the way that energy is produced stored and shared across country borders and time zones that's it for this week I hope you enjoyed the program if you did then please hit the like button and share the link with your friends subscribing to the channel is absolutely free and it shows your support for what we're trying to do here and just have a think and you can do that very simply by clicking on this link here as ever thank you very much for watching have a great week and remember - just ever think see you next week

Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 71,025

Rating: 4.938724 out of 5

Keywords: graphene, climate change, global warming, solar panels, water scarcity, desalination, cement

Id: um1Lk2UmKj8

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 10 2019