Only 1 Atom Thick…Graphene, The New Wonder Material

Have you ever looked closely at the end of your pencil? Well, it turns out that the end of your pencil is a new wonder material that could completely change the world.

Well, not exactly the graphite, but a super material known as graphene, which is only 1 atom thick, quite literally. So if you took some graphite, and were able to isolate a layer that was 1 atom thick, you’d be able to get graphene.

With super strength, superconductive properties, yet flexible and waterproof, graphene is 1 of the most promising nano-materials today.

This is what commercially available graphene looks like.

What’s Special About Graphene?

While graphite may not seem very impressive, graphene is a completely different story. At the nano-scale, the properties of graphite change, giving graphene superlative properties.

Graphene was discovered in 2004 by Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov from the University of Manchester, when they were able to isolate a single atomic layer of carbon.

This material has been given the title of being 1 of the strongest materials on our planet today. In fact, it’s 200 times stronger than steel, and even stronger than diamond!

How crazy is that?!

This is mostly due to the unique structure of graphene.

This is the atomic structure of graphene.

Most of graphene’s strength is due to strong covalent bonds between the carbon atoms.

The electrostatic forces result from delocalized electrons flowing through positively charged carbon atoms. The difference in charge creates a strong electrostatic attraction that results in strong bonds between the carbon atoms. This also explains why it is such a strong conductor, which will be explained later.

While graphite’s carbon atoms are arranged similarly, it is weaker due to many layers of atoms stacked on top of each other. The different layers of atoms are connected by weak London forces, and as a result are able to slide past each other, making graphite soft and quite brittle.

Graphene is stronger than diamond, since it is arranged as a sheet of ‘hexagons’, while the arrangement of carbon atoms in diamonds is more like a tetrahedron.

This is what the atomic structure of graphite looks like. The brown sticks represent the bonds between layers, which is why graphite is weaker than graphene.

As if that isn’t impressive enough in and of itself, graphene has extraordinary mechanical and electrical properties.

The primary reasons for its superconductive properties are also the strong covalent bonds, as well as the fact that it is only 1 atom thick. Since it is so thin, the electrons are able to move a lot faster and more easily, resulting in its superconductivity.

In fact, if bilayer graphene is chilled to a mere 1.7 degrees Celsius above absolute 0, it can conduct electricity with no resistance at all! Isn’t that cool?

Graphene is also almost completely transparent, transmitting 97.7% of light that passes through it. It is also lightweight and flexible, as well as waterproof!

Graphene could be that super material we’ve been looking for decades for!

Where Can Graphene Be Used?

• Carbon Nanotubes: Carbon nanotubes are essentially graphene sheets that are rolled into a cylindrical shape. Scientists plan to use these for a variety of different things, such as in energy storage, device modelling, automotive parts, boat hulls, sporting goods, water filters, thin-film electronics, coatings, actuators and electromagnetic shields.

This is the atomic structure of a carbon nanotube.

• Efficient LED Lighting: In a graphene LED light-bulb, the filament is coated with a layer of graphene, to take advantage of its superconductive properties. These light bulbs are 10% more efficient than current LED light bulbs, and are also cheaper to produce.

• Mobile Devices: Graphene can be used to create thermal foils which can make electronics a lot faster than they are today. It can also be used to make more sensitive and stronger touchscreens, as well as flexible displays. Imagine being able to literally bend your phone! To take things a step further, it’s even possible to have a transparent phone! Mobile devices can also be charged within mere seconds!

• Strengthening Everyday Materials: Graphene can also be applied to materials like metals, ceramics, glass, and other materials that we use every day to make them stronger, flexible, and waterproof, and overall, more efficient.
• Batteries and Supercapacitors: A graphene battery is light, durable and suitable for high capacity energy storage, as well as shortening charging times. Graphene, which is superconductive and has a large surface area is a perfect fit.

• Enhancing Fuel-cells: Graphene-based quantum dots, also known as graphene-wrapped nanocrystals, are able to serve as better catalysts to the oxygen reduction reactions in fuel cells better than platinum, which is also more expensive. It would be significantly easier to isolate hydrogen without building infrastructure for transferring hydrogen to automobiles. The fuel cells in combination with some external energy source will be able to produce their own hydrogen.

• Anti-corrosion Coatings and Paints: Using graphene to create anti-corrosion coatings and paints could be used for vehicles and metals, to prevent rusting, which is a problem with older infrastructure. This would use graphene’s waterproof abilities. Furthermore, they would also be stronger, and more resistant to physical risks.

• Efficient and Precise Sensors: Graphene-based sensors can be used for human health monitoring, and could help protect soldiers in dangerous environments, improve the function of cameras, protect crops and even reduce food waste. Sensors detect a voltage change in the presence of an analyte. Since graphene has excellent conductivity, thermal and adsorption properties as well as a very large surface area, it provides many different ways for molecules to be sensed.

• Efficient solar panels: Instead of using indium tin oxide, we could create ultra-thin, superconductive, waterproof, an therefore incredibly efficient solar panels that could revolutionize the renewable energy sector. Graphene-based quantum dots could help with this. These solar panels would also be flexible, so it would be easier to attach them to curved surfaces as opposed to just flat ones.

• Faster DNA sequencing: Graphene is an ideal membrane for DNA sequencing since the single-layer thickness is practically identical to the distance between two nucleobases in single stranded DNA. Graphene nanopores can have a diameter of only 1.0 nm (nanometres), about the size of a DNA molecule. By inserting the strand through the graphene ‘membrane’, we could even detect anomalies in sequences.

• Drug delivery: Aromatic anti-cancer drugs such as SN38 and doxorubicin were loaded onto a graphene surface through stacking, for intracellular drug delivery. High drug loading efficiency was achieved due to the extremely large surface area of graphene, with every atom exposed fully.

Key Takeaways

There have been and are still a lot of technological advancements happening every day. While graphene is an outstanding material and could completely disrupt the way our world works, there are limitations.

We still haven’t figured out how to produce graphene on a large scale. Companies such as Applied Graphene Materials and Comet Resources are working on just this.

If we could crack this problem, the possibilities are endless! We could have graphene cars, mobile devices, stoves that would heat within seconds, etc. Graphene is definitely our future with its immense potential, and with all the work being done on it today, don’t be too surprised when the first bendable phones come out tomorrow!