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Materials


Making sense of R


umour has it that, in the 1860s, Napoleon III reserved a special set of aluminium cutlery for his most distinguished guests. Because of the effort required to manufacture the metal at that time, aluminium was almost as precious as gold. But then, in 1886, two scientists chanced upon a process that led to the metal being produced on an industrial scale. The method involved the dissolution of aluminium oxide in the aluminium compound cryolite in order to lower its extremely high melting point (over 2,000°C) to something more manageable (900–1,000°C). The mixture was then heated rapidly using electrolysis until molten aluminium could be extracted. It is Dr Chris


Medical Device Developments / www.nsmedicaldevices.com


graphene


The multiple uses touted by the proponents of graphene, compared to the real-life applications seen thus far, is perhaps the greatest recent example of overpromising and underdelivering in the world of innovation. Researchers are still fi nding ways the material and its derivatives could improve aspects of the medical profession, yet the problem of producing it at scale on a cost-friendly basis has kept it from fulfi lling this potential. Mae Losasso speaks to Dr Chris Sorensen, Kjirstin Breure of HydroGraph and Dr James Tour, professor of organic chemistry and nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston, about their respective graphene production methods and why they’re optimistic for the material’s future.


Sorensen, vice-president of R&D at HydroGraph, who explains the tales of Napoleon’s cutlery and the mass production of aluminium in the 19th century, using it as an analogy to track the trajectory that graphene is currently on.


Graphene was first discovered in 2004 by scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the find in 2010. Consisting of one-atom-thick layers of carbon, arranged in two-dimensional hexagons, graphene is one of the thinnest, strongest, and hardest materials in the world – giving it many potential applications. Yet, for the last decade or so, graphene has remained largely that: a


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