The Impact of Graphene

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Incorporating pentagons into the graphene sheet lets you make things like buckyballs or the end caps for nanotubes. Incorporating heptagons lets you make a non-flat surface. This can warp up into a bulge that attaches to a carbon nano-tube. It is not clear how we can place the carbon atoms into the right spots. But if you could get them there it would be stable.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/NearABE 📅︎︎ Jun 26 2020 đź—«︎ replies

I love it: Pulling layers of graphene off of graphite with tape eventually leads to a nobel prize! I know there was way more to it than that, it's just amazing how humble the beginning was.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/chase314 📅︎︎ Jun 25 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Yes but what about graphene condoms?

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/Watada 📅︎︎ Jun 25 2020 đź—«︎ replies

It's pretty neat stuff, if you can mass-manufacture it cost-effectively. That's the big limiter right now - we can make graphene flakes that can be mixed into other stuff, but actually making sheets of pristine graphene is really difficult.

The stuff about the batteries is pretty neat. I hadn't realized how much of a difference it made with Lithium-Ion batteries. A four-fold improvement would not only be great for electric cars/trucks, but it would make electric planes a lot more viable.

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/Wise_Bass 📅︎︎ Jun 25 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Perhaps a new cheap method to produce mass quantities of high-quality Graphene will change the equation, not unlike Bessemer did for steel. P-}

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/sg_plumber 📅︎︎ Jul 01 2020 đź—«︎ replies

Funny how it's all about graphene nowadays, I remember when it was carbon nanotubes that were supposed to be the wonder material of the future.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/HAL9891 📅︎︎ Jun 26 2020 đź—«︎ replies
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This Episode is sponsored by Skillshare Carbon is the fundamental building block of life, but it may soon be the fundamental building block of the rest of the world too. So today we’re going to be looking at Graphene, ultra-thin flat sheets of a superstrong substance that folks have been talking about the potential of for over a decade now. We’ll be looking at what technologies it’s useful for, what its impact on our economy and civilization could be, and why the hype around it has died down somewhat. This episode is probably a bit more technical than our usual content, but hopefully it doesn’t fall too flat - even if that pun probably did. Let’s start with some basics. Graphene is an allotrope of carbon. Allotropes are the various forms of a single element that differ only by how the atoms are arranged and bonded to each other. Oxygen has allotropes of O2 the we breathe and ozone O3 that protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Phosphorus has allotropes of amorphous red phosphorus, in which the atoms bond to each other but not in any regular repeating structure, and white phosphorus or tetraphosphorus, in which each molecule contains four atoms bonded in a tetrahedral arrangement. Carbon and phosphorus both have many allotropes because they have four bonding sites on each atom and hence quite a variety of ways the atoms can bond with each other. The prettiest and hardest allotrope of carbon of course is diamond, but the most common is graphite, which is found in coal and is the most stable lowest energy configuration of carbon. There are many others including amorphous carbon also found in coal, nanotubes, buckyballs, and larger structures similar to buckyballs like C70. But it’s graphite we are most interested in today, because that’s where we can find Graphene. In the simplest form Graphene is a perfect arrangement of carbon atoms into a hexagonal honeycomb sheet, but it’s important to get a bit more detail on what Graphene is, as this isn’t commonly explained in most articles talking about the substance, and is actually a really important distinction. In this case, what we’re talking about is “true” or “pristine” graphene, which is a pure sheet of carbon atoms double-bonded. The lowest energy state of this type of bonding has all of the carbon atoms form into that “honeycomb” configuration, where the bonds create perfect hexagons within the two-dimensional arrangement of carbon atoms. This also explains why Graphene is so hard to make. You’re trying to perfectly position a bunch of carbon atoms into a hexagonal honeycomb, one atom thick, with no defects. Making two-dimensional compounds in their true forms is extremely difficult because even the slightest contamination or defects can dramatically affect their properties, and that kind of atomic-level precision in manufacturing has yet to be achieved. On top of this, they like to stack up or “agglomerate” due to Van Der Waals interactions, which is how Graphene becomes graphite, which is basically a jumble of defective graphene sheets stacked on top of each other. Graphene was first theorized in 1947 by Canadian scientist Phillip Wallace, who predicted that if a single laminated sheet of graphite were to be isolated, it would exhibit some interesting and anomalous qualities. Graphene might have been accidentally isolated in 1962, but the first provable publication of isolated graphene was in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester by what’s usually called the “Sticky tape” technique, where they used scotch tape to pull graphene layers off of graphite and deposit them onto silicon wafers. This then allowed them to prove it was graphene and confirm Wallace’s theory by observing the predicted Quantum Hall Effect in the material. This was what led to their 2010 nobel prize in physics and the surge in popularity for Graphene. Graphene’s two-dimensionality gives it many unique properties. It’s because of this quantum hall effect that its electrons behave as if they’re massless, giving it a charge carrying capacity one million times higher than copper, and this can only occur in a two dimensional material. 2-dimensional sheets of atoms, also called a monolayer, can be made of other materials like boron, silicon, germanium, and phosphorus, which then also have the appendix -ene tacked onto their names like Phosphorene or Germanene. Like Graphene, they have some unique properties too: phosphorene has some fascinating electrical properties due to Phosphorus’s ability to form five bonds. In many ways the future isn’t just graphene but all of these sorts of monolayer materials, like Arsenene – the monolayer of Arsenic – which is very valuable for LEDs and solar cells, or multi-atom type compounds like Molybdenum DiSelenide. But of them all, Graphene is likely to be the most ascendant star. It seems to have the most useful and scientifically interesting properties, and if it isn’t used in some of the applications we discuss today, it will only be because we find other things that do the job a bit better in that application, or are easier to produce. Economics can often outweigh exceptionality after all. Graphene is possibly most famous for having a tensile strength of 130 Gigapascals, which is about 50 times stronger than our strongest steel, and 240 times stronger than structural steel. As a result whenever talks about space elevators or megastructures come up, Graphene often does as well, especially for giant megastructures like those we’ll look at next week. The problem with this, however, is that it’s often forgotten that this only applies to pristine graphene, and also that graphene has a very low fracture toughness - it breaks like many ceramics. There is a very interesting exception to this, however, as two sheets of pristine graphene layered on top of each other, known as diamene, will behave as reactive armor and harden when pressure is applied. The properties of these variations on graphene, such as diamene, functionalized graphene, graphene oxide, holey graphene, or reduced graphene oxide, are all relevant. These materials are not technically graphene, but they are extremely useful and considered an important part of graphene research. The reason they aren’t considered such plays into our next point: graphene’s two-dimensionality. Graphene, while flat, isn’t quite two-dimensional, as a two dimensional object technically cannot exist, this is after all a 3-Dimensional universe. A perfect pristine graphene sheet, therefore, tends to have a ripple running through part of it at all times, keeping it existing in three dimensions. This could actually be useful, as it has been proposed that this rippling effect can be used to generate electricity by harnessing background energy by simply placing the conductive graphene sheet between an anode and a cathode, though using it for this is a long way off if possible at all. This two dimensionality also gives it the largest surface area possible, for the same reason a couple hundreds sheets of paper laid out next to each other have more surface than a book made of those sheets bound together. This is extremely useful for storage applications, particularly energy storage, and why graphene has been a major part of research into batteries and supercapacitors. Pristine graphene is extremely difficult to make, and is typically done by chemical vapor deposition of carbon atoms onto a copper sheet, which stabilizes the lattice. However, making variations of graphene like functionalized or reduced graphene oxide is typically done by chemically exfoliating graphite with sulfuric acid, and this process is widely used to make graphene oxide sheets for supercapacitors and batteries. This graphene has defects and functional carbon groups, which keeps it from being “True” graphene, but also makes it harder for it to agglomerate, easy to suspend in solution, and with treatment it can be porous which facilitates electron and ion transport through the sheets. These types of graphenes have been used to make supercapacitors with capacitances of more than a hundred times current industrial capacitors, with much faster charge and discharge capabilities, creating a supercapacitor that can be charged quickly and also discharged quickly for applications that require bursts of power. Adding Graphene to Lithium Ion batteries, or replacing the anodes themselves, increases their storage density by about two to three times. In fact Tesla has just revealed that their newest batteries are now using Graphene. Because Graphene is one of the most elastic materials known to man, able to stretch up to an additional 33% of its length and snap back, a lot of research has been directed to creating flexible batteries and capacitors for portable electronics, as well as flexible electronic glass for display screens. There are other applications, some mundane and some exotic, that revolve around what’s known as the “magic angle” that occurs between misaligned graphene sheets. When graphene sheets are misaligned in very specific ways, they can exhibit properties including semiconductivity, superconductivity, and photoconductivity. This means that among other things, graphene can make a solar panel that isn’t constrained by the Shockley-Quessier limit of roughly 30% on its efficiency, or a semiconductor with no band gap or even a PN junction, the interface in semiconductor materials that allows one-way flow of electrons. We’ve known for a long time that many “high temperature” superconductors - that is, superconductors operating between about -40 and -195 degrees celsius, tend to have flat tail-like structures on their molecules which align into planes when supercooled, which allows the electrons to superconduct across them. This has made inherently 2D materials like Graphene a major area of research as a result, which has yielded some significant breakthroughs, and Graphene or another 2D material is rather likely to end up being the first room temperature superconductor. Obviously, this brings us to looking at Graphene’s impact - and also what’s delaying that. There’s probably three major areas Graphene is going to fundamentally transform: computing and electronics, energy and energy storage, and structural engineering. In the world of computing, a two dimensional semiconductor which doesn’t have n-p junctions avoids a lot of the issues with trying to make semiconductors smaller, reducing the impact of many problems with trying to make N-P semiconductors smaller, such as electron tunnelling, that’s a bit technical so we’ll save anymore discussion of it for another day. But its far higher charge carrying capacity makes it a lot faster than silicon semiconductors too. In fact it’s estimated graphene will increase computing speeds by a factor of a thousand. Ultra-fast graphene computers will make all our personal devices much faster, but also opens up a lot of new areas - particularly in implanted medical electronics. Graphene is highly flexible, lightweight, and mostly bio-compatible so it can be used to create implants that fix problems like heartbeat arrhythmia, or used as a deployment agent for cancer drugs, or even be placed directly on the brain. It can also serve as a platform for nanomachines, although that’s a bit further out technologically. But your body could one day become an entire suite of graphene devices for things ranging from just monitoring physical activity, to self-repair and life-extension. See our episode on that topic for more. Obviously, superconducting and its incredible storage properties make graphene a major enabler for the energy revolution. 3-D printing graphene supercapacitors and batteries is extremely recent research, only about two or three years old, and is already offering capacitances an order of magnitude better than current graphene-based energy storage devices. Graphene supercapacitors would be perfect for applications like smoothing out the energy beaming of an orbital solar array, where microwaves are being sent in pulses to a rectenna, making it more efficient and less impactful than a continuous transmission. See our episode on Power Satellites for more on that. Lithium Ion batteries, or sulfide batteries stabilized with graphene, offer energy storage capacity three times what it is today,. They’re also more environmentally friendly. And Graphene based solar panels with efficiencies far higher than the current 24% of silicon photovoltaics would make the renewable energy revolution far cheaper, faster, and less environmentally impactful as well. They may well beat out the much-talked about perovskite panels in short order. See our episode on Mitigating Climate Change for more about near-future solar energy options. One of the most talked about applications is in structural engineering. As we already mentioned, this can’t be as direct as some people like, but the use of graphene or carbon nanotubes, which are technically just rolled up sheets of graphene, in structural applications will open a lot of new avenues due to not only their light weight and high tensile strength, but also the fact they can make materials that aren’t electrically or thermally conductive, conductive. For example, for decades scientists have been looking for a good thermally conductive alloy of titanium, and the process known as covetics enables that, as we mentioned earlier. But if we can develop materials that take advantage of most of Graphene’s tensile strength, it makes a lot of the megastructures we talk about on this channel feasible. And again we’ll look at such titanic structures next week. There’s plenty of other suggestions too: filtration is a big one, and graphene membranes for hydrogen electrodes will be a big part of revolutionizing that technology, allowing us to carefully control what goes through a membrane and what does not, even very small things compared to what most filters can handle, like hydrogen. In fact it’s great for anything having to do with Hydrogen, since it’s the only material hydrogen can’t permeate, though can be made to selectively allow hydrogen to permeate, which could be quite handy in other applications too. Hydrogen also isn’t just hard to store from being smaller than the gaps in materials we put it in it, so it can leak through, but also can be very damaging to those materials as it can get absorbed by them and cause hydrogen embrittlement. A thin protective layer of graphene between the hydrogen and the main material can prevent that. So protecting materials from hydrogen embrittlement will be a major application of Graphene in the future. For that reason it could also prove useful for hydrogen or deuterium Fusion energy, another much loved topic on the show. In fact it’s already been researched for use in traditional nuclear energy as well, as it could be used to directly capture and convert the energy of moving decay particles. It’s also been shown to slow the embrittlement of materials from alpha and beta decay particles, and possibly neutrons as well. And of course it possible warm or room-temperature superconducting properties might be very handy for fusion too. So for a material with applications literally everywhere in society, what’s holding it back? There’s a few big reasons: the first is that it’s still mostly in the R&D phase of technological readiness. There’s a lot we don’t know about graphene, particularly in how it interacts with the body, as we don’t want it to turn out to be the next asbestos. Graphene sheets are the sharpest objects in the world, and can cut cells open, or wrap around and suffocate them. We know certain proteins can break down graphene in the body, and that it doesn’t seem to be carcinogenic, but a lot more research in this area is needed. There’s also questions about how it interacts with the environment and food chains. Again, we don’t want this to end up like DDT, where it may be relatively non-toxic on Humans, but it turns out it decimates bird populations. The Graphene Flagship project in Europe, which is a more than 2 billion dollar initiative to commercialize the material, is spearheading a lot of this research. Another big issue is simply proprietary rights. A lot of the graphene technologies are gobbled up by a handful of conglomerates, so advances end up being stuck in a long intellectual property battle before they can get to market. This is why the graphene technologies that are being commercialized now are based on experiments that were conducted in 2009 or 2010. The massive advances we’ve made since then, like 3-D printed graphene aerogels or flexible supercapacitors, may not be seen until the late 2020’s. Also, Graphene is still hard to make, and expensive. A pristine graphene sheet of 4 square inches will run about 50 dollars a square inch, on the cheap side of things. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but now consider that graphene is a one atom thick, and applications will use dozens, hundreds, or thousands of layers of graphene. Suddenly the graphene anode for your battery becomes as expensive as the rest of the electric car you want to put it in, or the composite for your support beam is as expensive as a whole skyscraper. There are cheaper methods, if you’re not using pristine graphene, but materials like graphene oxide have to be sourced from very high purity graphite, as even the slightest silicon contamination has massive impacts on their efficiency. Cheap, low quality graphene is already seeing widespread uses - it’s being composited in everything from tennis rackets to bicycle frames by some companies if you’re willing to spend a lot of money. And higher quality stuff is being used in some supercapacitors, batteries, or filters, but they’re not exactly economically competitive at this time. And if we can make a lithium ion battery more efficient and cheaper without graphene, then its use may be delayed even further. Graphene indeed may not be the best material for every job, but it will revolutionize the future, and we can definitely expect to be seeing a lot more about it soon. We couldn’t cover everything in this episode, but Graphene-Info.com is a great resource to learn more about this revolutionary material, and keep track of news about it from the industry. As to its best known feature, it’s very high-tensile strength, we’ll be looking at that more next week as we contemplate building Continent Sized Rotating Space Habitats. So we’ve got some announcements and the schedule to get to, but before that… A lot of folks have suddenly found themselves working from home at their regular job or trying their hand at a new business or creative venture and since I mostly work at home I’ve gotten asked by various friends trying this out how I manage to get anything done and stay productive. The tricky thing is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to staying productive, at home or elsewhere. How to avoid distractions, how to schedule out what you’re doing and so on tends to vary from person to person and it's not the sort of thing you learn in school. You need to tailor to your own habits, strengths, style, and circumstance and constantly work on improving it, but you don’t have to re-invent the wheel either, you can borrow and adapt other folks’ patterns till you find what works for you. What let’s you get stuff done while feeling relaxed and in control, and if you can do that you’ll soon find you get more stuff done, and done better, and in less time with way less stress. If you’re looking to find some top-notch advice on enhancing your productivity, there’s a ton of great classes for it over on Skillshare, and I’d particularly recommend Greg McKeown’s class “Simple Productivity”. Perhaps you’re trying to adjust to working in a new environment or just looking to pick up some new skill or hobby, Skillshare has a course for it, whether you’re a beginner, a pro, a dabler, or a master, Skillshare has thousands of classes on a wide variety of topics from experts to help you learn. Skillshare is an online learning community for creatives, where millions come together to take the next step in their creative journey, and Members get unlimited access to thousands of inspiring classes, with hands-on projects and feedback from a community of millions. If you’d like to give it a try the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a 2 month free trial of Premium Membership so you can explore your creativity. Act now, and start learning, today. Before we get to the upcoming schedule of episodes, I wanted to take a quick moment to thank one of our long time script editors here, Evan Schultheis, who is a Graphene Researcher and contributed so much to the writing of this episode. He’s also a historian and author of the book “The Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, AD 451” and I’ll leave a link to that in the episode description for all you history buffs. I get to work with a lot of talented folks on this show who volunteer their time to help make this show great and they rarely get the credit they deserve, which as a reminder is in the show’s credit roll at the end of every episode, after our episode schedule and announcements. Speaking of that schedule, as mentioned next week we’ll be taking a look at some of the megastructures we might be able to build with help of Graphene, in Continent Sized Rotating Space Habitats. But before that we’ll be having our monthly Livestream Q&A, Sunday June 28, at 4pm Eastern Time. Join us live then to get all your questions answered. And then in two weeks will be taking a look at what it might be like to be living as a Brain in Jar… and how you could tell if maybe you already are one. If you want alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you’d like to help support future episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon, which is linked in the episode description below, along with all of our various social media forums where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the episodes and many other futuristic ideas. Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
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Views: 178,785
Rating: 4.9552021 out of 5
Keywords: graphene, carbon, nanotubes, future, science
Id: 2pocV0wKzEw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)
Published: Thu Jun 25 2020
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