Such a battery is the holy grail of electric car manufacturers. Graphene could have
applications in the war on terror. New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has shown graphene is 10 times more sensitive when detecting gases from explosive devices than current sensors used by bomb squads. “The most amazing
thing for me about graphene is its strength,” Rice University’s professor James Tour tells Newsmax. “This is a sheet
It’s so fl exible you could theoretically roll up your iPhone and stick it behind your ear like a pencil.”
— James Tour
from carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. “You can make graphene from just about anything,” says Tour. “Plastic waste, grass — anything with carbon in it. So source material for graphene will never be a problem.” Theoretically,
one atom thick that you can pick up — it’s mind-blowing. And it’s so fl exible you could theoretically roll up your iPhone and stick it behind your ear like a pencil. “Another amazing thing
TOUR
about graphene is that you can see it. You can lay a sheet on a white piece of paper and actually see it. “It is amazingly
transparent, absorbing just 2.3 percent of light that lands on it, but if you have a blank sheet to compare it to, you can see that it is there. Meaning you can see a single layer of atoms with your naked eye.” Tour and his team have
found a way to synthesize graphene using table sugar.
LIMITLESS RAW MATERIAL
There will never be a
shortage of raw material because graphene is made
NOBEL WINNERS Konstantin Novoselov, left, and Andre Geim, center, at Nobel award ceremony in 2010.
the process to make graphene should be environmentally friendly. Tour says the
incredible range
of capabilities promised by graphene is so exciting everybody is working on it. “They’ll be using it in fl uids needed for oil drilling, for superstrong lightweight composite tanks for hydrogen-fuelled cars, for smart glass with a memory — thanks to invisible graphene wires embedded in the glass. It’s got so much
potential.” Other scientists have predicted that it will be used to produce auto tires that last for the life of a car and superthin lighting that can be stuck to ceilings like wallpaper. Although its existence
was fi rst theorized in 1947, a Soviet-trained scientist, Andre Geim, was the fi rst to isolate graphene in a serendipitous moment in a lab in Manchester, England, in 2003. The biggest challenge
now is producing high- quality graphene on an industrial scale. “The Koreans are
already making and selling plenty of graphene,” adds Tour. The Korean electronics giant Samsung is now producing a touchscreen using the material, although it is not made from a high-quality version of graphene, he says. So far, the largest sheet of graphene produced
is 30 inches square, developed by Korean and Japanese researchers.
U.S. TAKES THE LEAD But U.S. researchers are
at the edge of promising developments that could lead to large-scale economical production of graphene, say experts. The University of Texas
is pioneering a chemical vapor method for creating large pieces of graphene. They heat up methane and hydrogen to 1,040 degrees Celsius and let the chemicals react with a copper sheet, leaving behind a layer of graphene. At the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, researchers are working on an industrial-scale “printing press” to crank out large sheets of graphene. But this is just the beginning, says its discoverer, Andre Geim. “It doesn’t just have one application. It is not even one material. It is a huge range of materials like plastics.” Geim and co-researcher
professor Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for their work on graphene. “Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again,” said the judges. Adds Tour: “Really, the
possibilities of graphene are limited only by our imagination.”
AUGUST 2012 | NEWSMAX MAXLIFE 65
TOUR/COURTESY OF JAMES M. TOUR, PH.D. / NOBEL/MARCEL ANTONISSE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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