Graphene - A Super Material We Don't Quite Get Yet

Graphene is an allotrope (meaning "other form") of carbon, where in it exists on an atomic scale as a two dimensional hexagonal lattice. The lattice is built using each atom as a vertex, here is an image showing how it would look on the atomic scale.

Graphene's composition allows for some startling features, three of them are:

• It's the thinnest material known and presently believed to be the strongest.
• It is a single layer of carbon atoms and is both flexible and transparent.
• Graphene is astonishingly conductive for heat and electricity equally.

With features like this Graphene has garnered allot of attention which leads us to the main issue, production. Graphene is made by placing a sheet of copper foil in a furnace containing argon gas. You then place carbon atoms on the copper and cover them with a plastic coating and spun 3000 times a minute. The multi-layered sheet is later broken apart from a combination of chemicals, driving off the copper and most foreign material. The raw graphene is then loaded onto a silicon chip, before being subjected to a blast of gold pellets and plasma. If Graphene lives up to current theories, then it has the potential to be a scientific breakthrough in countless fields. In application Graphene bring us.

• Ultra-fast uploads of terabits a second
• Nearly instantaneous charging
• Cleaning up the tainted water at fukushima
• Improved tennis racquets
• Unbreakable touch screens
• A new generation of headphones
• Graphene super capacitors would eliminate batteries

Graphene could even be used to make a water filter with holes small enough for water to pass through but not salt, even allowing bionic devices to connect directly to a patient’s neurons allowing them to relearn how to use their limbs. 

All of these things still only scratches the surface of what Graphene could potentially do, but there are still problems to overcome. Graphene is currently hard to produce on the scale that would be required to do the things listed above, but scientists are hard at work developing new ways to produce this super material. In 2015 a scientist developed a way to make better quality Graphene in much less time.

Citation

9 Incredible Uses for Graphene

Leslie Horn - http://gizmodo.com/5988977/9-incredible-uses-for-graphene

Graphene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use

John Colapinto - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/material-question

How Graphene Is Made And How It Was Discovered

Tech Times - http://www.techtimes.com/articles/166319/20160621/how-graphene-is-made-and-how-it-was-discovered.htm

There's a New Way to Build the Material of the Future

John Wenz - http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a14651/this-scientist-invented-a-simply-way-to-mass-produce-graphene/