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Friday, May 16, 2014
The Amazing Wonder Material That Will Revolutionize Technology
Graphene is a better conductor. It's transparent. It's lightweight. It's strong. It's flexible and elastic. In other words, it could change the electronics business.In the technology industry, every new product or service seems to come with the promise that it is an innovation with the potential to change the world. Graphene, a form of carbon, might actually do just that.
“Graphene is a wonderful material,” Jeanie Lau, a professor of physics at the University of California at Riverside, told Fortune. “It conducts heat 10 times better than copper and electricity 100 times better than silicon, is transparent like plastic, extremely lightweight, extremely strong, yet flexible and elastic. In the past decade, it has taken the scientific and technology communities by storm, and has become the most promising electronic material to supplement or replace silicon.”
Graphene has already found its way into a number of compelling applications, Lau said. For instance, “since it is both transparent and electrically conductive — two attributes rarely found in the same material in nature — it has tremendous potential as the transparent electrode in monitors, displays, solar cells, and touch screens,” she explained. “Companies such as Samsung that invest heavily in this area have already secured patents, produced prototypes, and are expected to bring products to market in a few years.”
Wearable electronic devices, aviation components, broadband photodetectors, radiation-resistant coatings, sensors, and energy storage are among numerous other areas of active research, Lau said.
For many researchers and investors, the ultimate application is graphene-based transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics. But getting there may take some time.
A child of graphite
First produced in a lab back in 2004, graphene is essentially a single layer of pure carbon atoms bonded together in a honeycomb lattice so thin it’s actually considered two-dimensional.
“We generally regard anything less than 10 layers of graphene as graphene; otherwise, it’s graphite,” said Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer in nanomaterials at the University of Manchester.
Even “graphene” is a bit of an umbrella term. “To oversimplify, there are two major types of graphene,” Michael Patterson, CEO of Graphene Frontiers, said. The first: “Nanoplatelets,” which are powders or flakes made from graphite. These have been around for a while and are “not really super-sexy,” Patterson said. “You mix them into polymers or inks or rubbers to make them conductive.” In flake form, graphene is already on its way to becoming a commodity, Patterson added.
The other type — in sheet or film form — is where graphene’s biggest promise lies. Graphene sheets have “incredible potential for electronics,” Patterson said. In the near term, that potential may manifest in situations where the quantity requirements are “not that great” and where quality or conductivity doesn’t have to be as high, such as in basic touch-screen applications, he said. Products that use graphene in
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