Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible To Use 187
An anonymous reader writes: We keep hearing about the revolutionary properties of graphene, an atom-thick sheet of carbon whose physical characteristics hold a great deal of promise — if we can figure out good ways to produce it and use it. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of graphene and its discoverer, Andre Geim, as well as one of the physicists leading a big chunk of the bleeding-edge graphene research, James Tour.
Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."
Quoting: "[S]cientists are still trying to devise a cost-effective way to produce graphene at scale. Companies like Samsung use a method pioneered at the University of Texas, in which they heat copper foil to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in a low vacuum, and introduce methane gas, which causes graphene to "grow" as an atom-thick sheet on both sides of the copper—much as frost crystals "grow" on a windowpane. They then use acids to etch away the copper. The resulting graphene is invisible to the naked eye and too fragile to touch with anything but instruments designed for microelectronics. The process is slow, exacting, and too expensive for all but the largest companies to afford. ... Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."
Now if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
we weren't already doing so many things we were once told were impossible.
Re:Now if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll see your impossible things and raise you "Things that will change the world" but have never been heard from after the initial hype.
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This is happening, just not at the pace you expected after falling for the hype.
It is a growing market, with lots of competition: https://ws.elance.com/file/Mar... [elance.com]
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Yeah who need bicycles or other mode of transport
Market does not lie.
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A segway would be a rubbish delivery vehicle for fast food, perhaps for something like delivering the post where you're stopping constantly and don't have time to reach a high speed between stops. Segways could be a couple of hundred quid and they'd still likely be a failure. I can already walk, and although the segway could speed me up a little the hassle of chargi
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Depends.
You can move through cities faster then walking, a lot faster.
I would own one if they where a few hundred dollars.
Doesn't matter though. That statement was said by 1 person, where as many scientific expert in material science already know what application graphene could do, if they could manufacture it in more volume.
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Exactly. A decent bicycle is faster (Segways top out at 12mph), much cheaper, not hard to fix, and if I need to go up some stairs or over other terrain, it's not hard to just pick it up and carry it. How much do Segways weigh?
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At least my bread was baked in my bread baking machine this morning.
(No it wasn't.)
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With the subtle difference in that we know a many. many ways graphene, and will change the world. There are application waiting for it.
Graphene isn't the issue, manufacturing it cheaply is.
I have n doubt someone will figure out how to manufacture it cheaply.
This is like conversation I had about the blue LED 25 years ago. We knew we could do a lot with it. We knew what would change. WHat wasn't known was how to do it cheaply.
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How's diamond semiconductors working out ?
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How about things that were hyped as world changers when they appeared, turned out to be impossible at the time, and quietly put into practice a couple of decades later, after they hype died down? They're often not world changers when they become successful.
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There is no logic to apply to this at all.. Pessimism about this doesn't mean it can't happen nor its opposite.
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That's not what his logic says at all, nor is it what the OP's logic says.
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Reading comprehension, get some.
He / She / It said:
Now if only we weren't already doing so many things we were once told were impossible.
What you think OP said, and that is wrong: "everything anyone said was impossible we are doing anyways."
What OP really said, in a short and concise way that a normal thinking being can understand: "There are many things that seemed, and were deemed impossible at the time, that we can now do quite simply today due to unforeseen advances in technology."
You might want to look up your qualifiers and brush up on them, you seem to be confusing "so many", meaning
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Association Fallacy [wikipedia.org] or Galileo Gambit [wikipedia.org] to be specific.
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we can go to the moon but we can't correctly identify a phallacy
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Yeah you are right "Galileo Gambit" does not apply. It is just straight Association Fallacy. (Nice pun) The premise being that since we are now doing thing we though were impossible everything that we think is impossible now is actually possible later.
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Name the logical fallacy you claim the grandparent to be using.
Where the set A is "impossible things" and B is "possible things":
Because a subset of A has become B does not imply that all A will become B.
Don't know what the name is, but it's basic logic.
Landing a man on the moon would have been considered impossible two hundred yeara ago. time travel is considered impossible now.
Just because we landed a man on the moon doesn't mean we will ever have time travel.
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I can name your fallacy - Straw Man.
You've created an easily torn down argument that he never made.
He did not say "Therefore it's actually possible" at all, he merely pointed out that in the past, things have been thought impossible, which have then proven to be possible.
So if you're going to put words in his mouth, then it should be like this:
"Oh they said x wasn't possible but now we can do it, therefore anytime someone says an "x" is impossible, it doesn't necessarily mean that we should give up"
Mass production ? (Score:5, Informative)
And yet, I read about a team in Cambridge in the UK who have a new low temperature process that can create graphene in industrial quantities.
http://cambridgenanosystems.co... [cambridgenanosystems.com]
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And yet, I read about a team in Cambridge in the UK who have a new low temperature process that can create graphene in industrial quantities.
http://cambridgenanosystems.co... [cambridgenanosystems.com]
Do you expect the New Yorker to do actual research (or even a google search) before writing an article or something?
Re:Mass production ? (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet, I read about a team in Cambridge in the UK who have a new low temperature process that can create graphene in industrial quantities. http://cambridgenanosystems.co... [cambridgenanosystems.com]
Do you expect the New Yorker to do actual research (or even a google search) before writing an article or something?
That was covered in the summary:
"Nearly every scientist I spoke with suggested that graphene lends itself especially well to hype."
Re:Mass production ? (Score:5, Informative)
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The New Yorker has very good factcheckers. Maybe they don't work on everything (they don't, articles that get them in trouble get priority) but their reputation on factchecking is excellent.
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Those are very small pieces of graphine. It is more like the tiny industrial diamonds that were initially produced. Most of graphine's use is when larger sheets can be made.
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And from the tiny diamonds before we can now grow large gem quality ones. Same with Graphene, and a long way from the Samsung process.
Re:Mass production ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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When you say pencil, I'm pretty sure you mean "graphite". A lovely and useful substance, to be sure, but not especially close to graphene.
Re:Mass production ? (Score:5, Informative)
Somebody with a Nobel Prize [physicscentral.com] would disagree with you.
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Actually, graphite is merely disorganized graphene - the layers of graphene in graphite are in general layers (which let you lay down a line fairly easily), but they're not particularly big nor particularly long - it's really a disorganized heap of graphene molded together. When you write with a pencil, the line is composed of a lot of little pieces of graphene.
Heck, one
Re:Mass production ? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm an idiot with a pencil and I don't even know where to start!
Cambridge is in the UK? (Score:2)
Learn something new every day.
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It's off the M11 north of London, actually.
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UK - isn't that an island somewhere off the coast of Europe?
I heard they even speak English there.
Re:Mass production ? (Score:4, Informative)
Mass production- of graphene powder. Cambridge Nanosystems' process makes flakes of graphene in the 200-800 nm diameter range; cf. this interview [graphene-info.com] with their chief scientist. It's still a valuable material with many potential uses; that interview talks about composite materials and conductive inks. However, it's a very different product with different applications from a large-scale monolayer sheet.
wimpy talk (Score:5, Insightful)
it's just an engineering challenge. in the late 19th century, people would have scoffed at the idea of an electrical device with over 4 billion components in a few square centimeters that was mass produced.
Or imagine the most esteemed scientist of that day being told that a 200 meter long submarine vessel with a crew of 150 could be made with a power plant that only needed refueling every fifteen years, and that it could go for months underwater without surfacing, with weapons sufficient to destroy dozens of large cities.
Re: wimpy talk (Score:5, Insightful)
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No one ever claimed he invented or conceived of the submarine. Put your straw man back in your poop chute.
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Honestly, reading the synopsis of the plot of 20,000 Leagues, it seems he contributed more to Star Trek than he did to reality.
I don't remember Captain Nemo ever losing his shirt and making out with every mermaid, daugters of Neptune or any other female denizens of the deep that get in range of his tentacles... I guess they got Kirk's predilections from elsewhere.
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I seem to remember Gene Roddenberry originally conceived of Star Trek as "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" in space.
(If you've never seen Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, it was a television show about a submarine crew that explored the deepest parts of the ocean)
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He pitched is as a space western.
He did start pitching it the same year, but earlier, as Voyage aired.
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Nemo was kind of like Khan, driven only by revenge for the killing of his wife and family and loss of his kingdom in the First Indian War, and his vendetta against imperialism.
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Kahn was like Ahab.
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You should not read the synopsis, but the book.
It is quite interesting, good story and well written (depending on translation perhaps).
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It is differently written. Written in a way that no one write anymore, and as such may be difficult for the reader. This goes fro most books written in the era.
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Well, I read it in german (for the first time) when I was 14. Which is like 35 years ago. I found it a nice story, I don't care about 'how a book is written' the more complicated the better, imho.
Obviously I read it several times when I was young, just don't know who in my family owns the book right now.
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Well, the Great Eastern was 211 meters long and it was built by 1858. Pretty sure those engineers would have been more open-minded. Maybe you need to talk to different people when you time travel to the 19th century and pretend to talk for all of them.
Talk to Isambard Kingdom Brunel next time maybe?
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I have shocking news for you from the 19th century, they inform me that the Great Eastern could only become a submarine vessel after sinking, what with it being a surface steam ship and all
Re:wimpy talk (Score:5, Interesting)
Graphene in addition to the engineering challenges does have some very fundamental scientific challenges as well.
The most important challenge is its lack of a bandgap meaning that graphene transistors cannot be turned off. That drawback means that while it may have a ~500GHz cutoff frequency on par with silicon and below the InP records it will not modulate current in an energy-efficient way, and while it can create some forms of logic the lack of a bandgap limits its power amplifying frequency to a measly 50GHz, well below the competing technologies. Contrast that with Northrop Grumman's recent 1000GHz amplifier [darpa.mil], which is admittedly not a great amplifier since it is run very near its cutoff frequency it has 1dB or less gain per stage, but it works which is still quite impressive.
So far the various methods that can give graphene a bandgap also take away the extremely fast electron transport properties that made graphene so interesting for electronics in the first place. Some of us working on competing technologies wonder why hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on graphene transistor development without solving the fundamental bandgap problem - of course we just want that money directed to our own research, but some of us try to be realistic about the capabilities of what we are developing ;-)
I'm sure graphene will be useful for some things but so far there are still some fundamental problems that need to be solved before using it for high-speed electronics for wireless applications or digital logic. We'll see how it does.
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forget transitors, they're so 20th century. Quantum dots and such, that's a better use for graphene
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it's just an engineering challenge. in the late 19th century [...]
So what you're saying is that in a couple hundred years, we'll have cracked it.
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So where are our flying cars? We want our flying cars.
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that was done in 1949, that Aerocar and other flying cars since then of course require a pilot's license. The market figured it's just better to just buy a damn plane and leave it parked at the airport.
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Nope.
Just for clarification, this is a flying car:
http://imgur.com/oMwa9Yp [imgur.com]
Notice the car on the right. That's from a 1940 magazine writting about what 2011 would look like.
AS opposed to an Aerocar.
Also:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9vdT... [blogspot.com]
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Just for clarification, this is a flying car: http://imgur.com/oMwa9Yp [imgur.com]
Notice the car on the right. That's from a 1940 magazine writting about what 2011 would look like.
From a fashion perspective, they were wrong about the tutus but right about the yoga pants.
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yeah that miniskirt with tights look came and went in the late 90s
Stalwart Enemy of Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Scale isn't that much important (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith
I will just leave this channel here, that shows how easy it is to make it on small scale
Also graphene oxide can be turned into graphene with just laser from lightscribe-enabled dvd burner -.-
Also not every application requires high-purity/quality graphene
They'll figure it out. (Score:2)
Materials and Process Scientist and Engineers will continually evolve the processes making it more cost effective. As for the "hype" about Graphine why are companies jumping on-board to manufacture it? Much like industrial and gemstone quality diamonds, or even Carbon Fiber, eventually a process will be found and Graphine will find more uses because it'll be less expensive.
James Tour made me a Comp Sci (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a student at Rice, where James Tour teaches. First semester my freshman year, I made the mistake of trying to take Organic Chemistry with James Tour as my professor.
That class proved to me that I was not, in fact, a chemical engineer.
I switched to Computer Science the next year, but it always makes me laugh seeing Prof. Tour's name.
Re:James Tour made me a Comp Sci (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, taking it wasn't a mistake because it kept you from spending years learning something you weren't really cut out for. And, if you count in the tuition money you saved, it may have been the best thing you ever did while at Rice.
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That's a pity, because chemical engineers usually leave the actual chemistry to the chemists. Chemical engineering is more about process design, process control, upscaling and debottlenecking. You mostly get the chemical process outlaid by the chemists and you "only" have to worry about everything around it. We have started to dabble with material design, but you can be a good chemical engineer without a profound understanding of chemistry. Chemistry is mostly about the basic "what" and "how" whereas chemic
Aluminium (Score:5, Interesting)
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And in the 50s we were going to be driving nuclear powered cars by now.
Re:Aluminium (Score:5, Insightful)
And in the 50s we were going to be driving nuclear powered cars by now.
And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.
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Oh, but it's not really nuclear powered because uranium is made in suns, so it's a solar powered car (sarc).
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No, it's a Big Bang powered car.
That right, they are powered by the sheer idiocy of that show.
Playing with words. (Score:2)
And indeed, some of us are. If you drive an electric car and live near a nuclear power plant, you might be one of them.
The atom powered car, ship, train or aircraft as imagined in the late forties, fifties and sixties was powered by an internal nuclear reactor.
The ideal would be a vehicle or a vessel that would never need refueling.
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If only Napoleon III used Uranium utensils.
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And that feasible and a couple where built.
Sadly, radiation put an end on that! More precisely the humans lack of tolerance for radiation.
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Nah, it's the insurance rates that really killed that project.
Maybe if they used graphene to make it... (Score:2)
Eureka! I think I know what dark matter is made of (Score:1)
The same hype that graphene is made of...
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well, graphene lends itself especially well to hype. Yet another addition to its extensive array fascinating properties.
Same old story (Score:4, Insightful)
Misleading title (Score:4, Interesting)
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In strength it is both.
Graphene is incredibly strong for a one atom thick material. All other materials need far more layers of atoms to achieve the same strength.
However: it is a one atom thick material. That means it doesn't have much absolute strength.
And the strength of graphene is non-uniform. It is far stronger in 2 directions than in the 3rd one
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It was pick one, and they picked "impossible to use".
Impossible to use? (Score:2)
Little known fact. (Score:3)
Elon Musk can convert coal into graphene by squeezing it with his buttcheeks.
But he won't, because he's too busy to run another company right now.
article mentions high temp superconductors too (Score:2)
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Speak for yourself.
Re:So No Space Elevator ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't make condoms better.
The first problem with condoms is they block the feeling of moisture. The second is they block the movement of the foreskin. Of course, for men who are circumcised and so who already lost most of their ability to feel what sex is (because of thicker and less sensitive skin as well as no foreskin movement), it doesn't matter much, but even then there's the third problem of the pause between foreplay and penetration which change sex from an act of pure passion to something, let's say, less spontaneous.
All of those problems won't be solve with thinner condoms.
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I haven't heard of any reliable study concluding that circumcision diminishes the sexual experience (although I'm not sure what the methodology would be), but putting the condom on can be part of foreplay.
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This would actually be a pretty trivial experiment to conduct. Survey of men who had circumcisions after becoming sexually active, and rate their opinion of the sexual experience before and after the surgery. Granted, there will have to be a number of factors to take into consideration, such as personal perception of self image before and after surgery, etc.
Last time I checked (and it's been over 10 years), about 1% of men require circumcision in adulthood for medical reasons. If even 1% of them were sex
Wow, the language! (Score:2)
Only faggots such as yourself are obsessed with whether or not a penis is circumcised and adopt such an elitist stance that circumcised men don't know what sex feels like.
Wow, what's with all the hatred? I don't see anything offensive in the above, just an incomplete perception. Maybe simply explaining the matter would've been enough.
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Wow, what's with all the hatred? I don't see anything offensive in the above, just an incomplete perception. Maybe simply explaining the matter would've been enough.
Perhaps the AC can simply try being circumcised and if he doesn't like it - oh wait ...
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He didn't say you don't know what sex is, he said you've "lost most of [your] ability to feel what sex is". That doesn't mean you haven't had sex. It's all very well saying that partners make a difference - that's obvious to anyone who's had at least two partners - but that doesn't address at all the question of the difference between being circumcised and not being circumcised. As a non-circumcised man I can tell you that walking around with your foreskin pulled back inside your jeans is PAINFUL. Circu
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It was done when I was freshly born, by a doctor and with anesthesia - which is the *only* acceptable way to to it, btw.!
I disagree. Genital mutilation should be restricted to necessary medical procedures, and people who want it done and can give their consent.
Re:So No Space Elevator ??? (Score:5, Funny)
A graphene condom for me would be the same as a space elevator.
OT: shitting is part of life (Score:1)
1) consume
2) expel waste
3) reproduce