Will Graphene Revolutionize the 21st Century? 345
An anonymous reader writes "Much has been made of graphene's potential. It can be used for anything from composite materials — like how carbon-fiber is used currently — to electronics. 'Our research establishes Graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,' mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, said in a statement. If graphene can be compared to the way plastic is used today, everything from crisp packets to clothing could be digitized once the technology is established. The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone."
Strong enough to make cables for Space elevator (Score:3, Interesting)
Its probably got lots of other great uses, but the one I think of most is that its strong enough to make cables for a space elevator. That alone would be revolutionary.
Nope (Score:3, Interesting)
Graphene will never be used for strong materials.. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, if graphene is the material of the 21st century, it will be entirely because of its electronic properties, not the mechanical.
Re:Graphene will never be used for strong material (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember carbon nanotubes? (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago all the rage was about carbon nanotubes. An entire generation of phd students was raised on this material. Carbon nanotubes were the material of the future, enabling the space elevator, nanoscale transistors, near-superconductor conductivity and so on. What is left today?
Even before that there were C60 buckyballs, another previously unnoticed carbon allotrope. Buckyballs were set to revolutionize chemistry and were (are) part of n-type organic semicunductors. What is left today?
A fad is a fad, even in science. Of all the imagined applications a few will remain, and will be turned into real applications by technologists and engineers. The scientists will move on to the next fad - well at least those who are quick enough.
Except, of course.... (Score:4, Interesting)
...that most of the technologies used in your "self-sustainable" lifestyle are the result of recent developments and investments in new technologies, most of which have been about pushing down the costs of the tech involved.
Your solar array? Only became feasible at the individual installation level in the last five years (and is improving rapidly) due to heavy R&D investment. Ditto that windmill (arguably, that's more about moving the industrial base to China and the associated cost savings - unless you have carbon fiber blades).
And that's ignoring the effect of cheap and powerful computers on design - affordable solid form CAD, FEA, CFD, and ubiquitous CAM means that anybody can buy Solidworks, MasterCAM, and a HAAS 3-axis mill and start making chips at a startup cost that is a tiny fraction of what that capability cost even 10 years ago.
Unless you are mining your own ore, smelting your own raw materials, logging your own trees, growing your own seed (and your own fertilizer) your are as much a part of "the system" as the rest of us; a couple of solar panels be dammed.
DG
Re:Ultracapacitors (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what I love so much about graphene. It was just sitting there all those years and nobody thought of it. I remember being in electronics class years ago when we calculated the size of a capacitor that could power an electric car for a certain distance. It was HUGE. Yet we all knew the formula for capacitance and nobody came up with even ultracapacitors. Finally with graphene capacitors are going to get an incredible leap in what they can do... and all that time it was right under our noses.
Re:Strong enough to make cables for Space elevator (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually they said something along the lines of,"Your estimates make the world too small, there's no way you can sail west and reach Asia in the short period of time you are proposing."
I propose a game: (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Obtain an outline map of the world, preferably black and white.
2. Select four colors. 1, 2, 3, and 4.
3. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be nigh-unimaginably futuristic(routine occurrence of transhumans, strong AIs, kilometer high metamaterial structures, etc.) in 2061 with color 1.
4. Fill all areas of the world that you expect to be surprisingly mundane in 2061, except for a few of those wacky details that futurists never get right(everybody is still working in cubicles and flying aging 787s; but something as unexpected as facebook would have been in 1950 occupies 30% of the cube-dweller's time), with color 2.
5. Fill all areas of the world that will still be "developing" in 2061(the local elites will have access to everything from the color 2 zones, and color 1s, if present; but the bulk of the populace will still be mired in such classics as mud farming, Kalashnikovs, and nokias) with color 3.
6. Fill all areas of the world that will be radically dystopian and/or uninhabitable for cool reasons(radical climate shifts/flooding, nanite plague, biotech advances make new strains of smallpox and anthrax and friends as common as new malware is today, etc.) with color 4.
7. Argue at length about one another's maps.
Re:Strong enough to make cables for Space elevator (Score:0, Interesting)
Look at the type of arguments you get from them... It's all about imagination. Fuel up a 747 with "imagination" and tell me how far you get!
Re:Strong enough to make cables for Space elevator (Score:5, Interesting)
And you don't NEED to "break ties" with Earth. It's called trade, and it built the world we know out of a world or primitive barbarism..
Re:Strong enough to make cables for Space elevator (Score:5, Interesting)
something can be expensive to build and maintain and still be worth the money many times over.
the US rail and road networks are incredibly expensive to build and maintain yet they're worth the cost.
Now I couldn't even take a guess as whether it could be worth the cost since we don't even know what a space elevator might cost so I'm going to stick to fairly safe and general statements and simply argue that there are a lot of possibilities unless a space elevator would cost trillions.
there's a hell of a lot of possibly very valuable applications if you could ship things to orbit for a very low price.
orbital power arrays would be fairly sensible and could even be cheaper long term than some of the current energy production methods: get even a fraction of the world energy market and you'd be able to make/save a lot of money.
There's some added advantages with zero pollution etc
If it's one country building the elevator they could almost monopolize the market for a fair amount of time and rake in money building arrays for other countries.
Once you build one elevator any more become far cheaper to build so much of the construction costs of the first could be spread out over multiple such elevators.
any country which can ship lots of hardware into space for a low cost would also gain a significant military advantage: it's hard to build a bunker which can survive a thick tungsten bar dropped from orbit.
There's pretty much the whole current worldwide market for launching satellites for communication and anything else which you'd pretty much take over.
So you've got the energy market, the military market, the current space market and probably quite a few I've not thought of for income and those are big big markets.
Conductor issues (Score:3, Interesting)
The article makes a rudimentary statement about graphene and fails to acknowledge that it is a conductor and not a semiconductor. That limits some of its use without using it in a complex composite to create a limited semiconductor material. As it stands now though graphene would be excellent for power transfer and screen technology. I think it will certainly establish a change in the way technology is used as chips grow smaller and screens grow larger and more flexible. We could see folding screens in a few years which would be an amazing improvement over our current systems. Laptops could be equipped with unfolding screens. Smartphones could so the same. Home theaters could become portable in a quite interesting and unique way.
In other words, it will revolutionize the 21st century as our viewing technology makes a giant leap forward but silicon is going to be the dominant semiconductor for atleast the next decade or so while they work out a graphene composite that can cut some of its conductor properties. But graphene could be the answer to the wall viewers, curved displays, and other super-sized designs.
Re:Largest sheet yet produced? (Score:4, Interesting)