How to Make the Strongest Material in the World—Graphene!

hey everybody today I'm going to be showing you the strongest material known to man graphene and I'm also going to be showing you how to make your very own and I'd also like to thank keeps for sponsoring this video now this graphene is extremely strong it's 200 times stronger than steel now what's amazing about this piece of graphene I have here is that it's only one atom thick so I have here a one centimeter square piece of real graphene now let me explain what I mean so this sheet that I'm holding is obviously not the graphene this is not one atom thick and on top of it there's a quartz plate that's not the graphene either but on the quartz plate there's a one atom thick piece of graphene now what's amazing is you think that's something that's only one atom thick would be completely impossible to see with the naked eye but that's not true at all you can actually see graphing because of a very specific property that graphene can absorb an extreme amount of light based on the thickness of it so one sheet of graphene that's only one carbon atom thick can actually absorb 2% of the light that passes through it that means that you can actually see it so if you look on this quartz square here a little bit smaller than the square you'll actually see a dark shade so right there can you see in the middle there's a slight darker square that is the graphene it's only one atom thick but we can actually see it can you believe it so not this plastic piece not the quartz piece but on the inside of the quartz piece you can see a slight outline of another square that is the one atom thick grapheme layer it's amazing so how thick is one atom thick well this paper that it's on is around 650 thousand atoms thick so you can see how thin it is and this is 650 thousand atoms about but we can actually see this square of graphene and it's only one atom thick so it's 650 thousand times thinner than this but you can still see it so this means that because graphene absorbs so much light you only need a few sheets of it only a few nanometers in order to block all light for example here's some stacked up layers of graphene also known as graphite and you can see how it's completely opaque metallic looking so this is on the order of millions to billions of tiny little sheets of that graphene stacked up but what if we wanted to actually start with graphite and get graphene out of it is it possible well a few years ago it was thought that it was impossible to get graphene from graphite but it turns out all you need is a little bit of scotch tape now before we go on I'd like to think keeps for sponsoring this video so did you know two out of every three guys will experience some form of male pattern baldness in their life but keeps treatments are up to 90 percent effective at reducing and stopping further hair loss in fact sixty-six percent of men will experience hair regrowth with keeps treatments but you don't have to go broke preventing your hair loss keeps offers generic versions of the only two fda-approved hair loss treatments you used to have to go to your doctor to get a prescription to get medication in order to prevent hair loss but now it keeps you can just order it and receive it at your house it's really convenient so if you're ready to prevent hair loss go to keeps calm slash the action lab to get 50% off your first product and thanks again to keeps for sponsoring this video now back to the experiment now even though graphene is so strong before 2004 it was thought that a single mono layer of graphene was impossible to make they thought it was thermally unstable and it couldn't exist but in 2003 two physicist named gaim and novoselov created a method to actually extract pure graphene and they did it with an extremely simple method just using scotch tape now because this upended the traditional thought that you can't make pure graphene and also because they did it with such a simple method that actually won them the Nobel Prize in 2004 now if you don't have these sheets graphite you can actually just use the pencil so pencil led is actually made of mostly graphite the softer the pencil led the more graphite there is in it so I'm going to be using this type of pencil that has a lot of graphite you can actually use one that doesn't have a lot of graphite in it as well and you should still be able to find pieces of graphene okay so let me show you what we're going to be doing to try to isolate our graphene so pretend that this is a layer of graphite what it really is is a stack of hole punched pieces of paper but they're all stacked together so this is equivalent to a little piece of graphite that has layers of graphene stacked so we're going to get our tape and put our graphite on it and then we're just gonna fold it together and every time we touch it together in a spa it's gonna pull off some layers and we're just going to keep doing it and each time we do it it's going to pull more and more layers off of the graphite seeing if you do it enough times you'll end up with single layers of graphene in some spots you'll notice that some spots are still stacked up layers but there are some individual spots where there's actually a single layer there okay so I'm just going to make a tiny dot with the graphite here and then get some scotch tape and then you just transfer it onto the tape and then from here you just keep folding the tape sticking it together so you just stick it together then pull it apart and stick it together and pull it apart stick together and pull it apart okay so what you're going to end up with is just kind of a bunch of smudges on the tape here now if you can keep track of the DA and look at the dot that has been transferred the most number of times that's the spot where you're most likely to find graphene okay so now all I've done is stuck the tape on a glass slide here I sprayed some glue on the glass slide and then stuck the tape so the sticky side is up and we're going to look at all the spots that I stuck a lot of times with the graphite pencil there so we're going to be looking for any layers that we can see that are actually allowing any light to pass through so these particles are really small that's because we're using graphite from a pencil and so it was already ground up to very small pieces now you have to be careful when you do this because you might be mistaken for some layers that look like they're graphene but they're actually most likely just your skin cells because you're using your fingers to pull the tape apart and it's really easy to get your skin cells stuck to it you the way you can know that they're most likely graphene is they're gonna be the same size of chunks as the dark spots they're not gonna be bigger than that okay look at that we've found some graphene so notice how all the chunks around it are dark that's because there's multi layers of graphene in those so it's still considered graphite because each layer each individual atomic each individual atom thick layer of graphene absorbs around 3% of light so you can see you only need a few layers of it before you actually have a dark material because it just absorbs all the light that goes through it probably living around 80% of light through it there you can tell that's only a few layer of graphing there see how the other see how these other ones are so dark hey everybody thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified with my latest videos out and thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 1,019,199

Keywords: graphene, graphite, strongest material, strong, stronger than diamond, stronger than steel, the action lab, isolate graphene, science, graphene technology, graphene production, graphene strength test, what is graphene, scotch tape, high strength

Id: IFwwuldS3VM

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020