Graphene

Graphene the material of Future

Graphene was theorised in 1840’s by recently created in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester., it is an allotrope of carbon consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in an hexagonal lattice.

It is the strongest material ever tested yet. It is super-capacitive, conducts electricity better than silver, 200 times stronger than steel, yet is ultra light and can be molded into any shape. These properties make graphene the material for our technological advancement in space travel, architecture, efficient energy transfer and much powerful computers. If not this then atleast we can make the Captain America shield out of it.

It gained the hype in 2013 when scientist used graphene as an electricity source for an bulb and the results were amazing, with charging for mere seconds graphene was able to gains electric current which was able to make the bulb light up for minutes.

But then came the downfall, graphene faded away not because it was a hoax but because we were having difficulties making it. We were able to make very small amounts of graphene with very difficult processes. Hence it was not studied on a large scale, then in 2015 a study came out in which they literally grow the graphene lattice on a copper base. But from that method they could only grow a sheet of 8x13mm, which was not so great.

Then in 2017 we had a promising method described in study by Nature and Communications stated that they could make graphene in a single step, by heating soya bean oil to 800 degree C on a nickel foil, this reduced the manufacturing cost by 10 times but scaling was still an issue as the largest sheet created was the size of a credit card.

Then finally again in 2017 a physics professor patented a high yield method of making graphene, it is scalable, cheap, does not require a special laboratory and does not require any harmful chemicals. In this method they literally explode oxygen and acetylene, acetylene gives the required carbon which makes itself into graphene in the heat of the explosion. But the resultant graphene is not in sheets which are ready to be industrially used but they are made in chucks which are huge when compared to other methods but the graphene made is not high quality.