Twenty years ago, scientists announced that they had created a new miracle substance that would change our lives. They called it graphene.
Composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern, it is one of the strongest materials ever created and is naturally a better conductor of electricity and heat than copper. Excellent in sex.
The possibilities for technological revolution seemed endless, with new generations of ultra-fast processors and computers predicted. According to the report, this could allow batteries to charge five times faster and increase the strength of concrete by 35%.
It was also proposed as a pothole solution. It was claimed that simply mixing it with traditional surfacing materials would eradicate the curse of modern driving.
The scientists who discovered this, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, of the University of Manchester, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, and the National Graphene Institute was established at the university.
However, the hype for this miracle material has significantly waned. Graphene has not yet sparked an electronics revolution. The potholes are still with us.
So what happened to the graphene revolution? Why hasn't it changed our world? Sir Colin Humphreys, professor of materials science at Queen Mary University of London, answers candidly: I am. “Graphene is still a very promising material. The problem is scaling up production. That's why it hasn't had as much of an impact as predicted.”
Humphreys explained that graphene was originally created in a fairly unusual way. Geim and Novoselov created this by applying adhesive tape to a block of graphite and peeling off the layers until they were atomically thick.
“But it would only be a small flake a few millimeters in diameter,” he added. “You can't make electronics with that kind of scrap. Devices need at least 6-inch wafers of the material to work. That's why IBM, Samsung, and Intel are scaling up graphene production to create useful formats and quantities. We spent billions of dollars trying to produce it with little success.”
As a result, the graphene revolution was put on hold, but there have been recent encouraging signs that the technology may soon regain much of its original promise.
Humphries believes the market could soon be reinvigorated thanks to breakthroughs in the manufacturing of graphene-based devices. A key development in this push was made by Humphreys and colleagues who realized that the technology used to make gallium nitride electronic components could be used to make graphene on a large scale.
“We used some of the first graphene produced in this way to create a sensor that can detect magnetic fields,” Humphreys said. Mr. Humphreys later founded a spin-off company, Paragraph, with his team.
The company, based in the village of Somersham in Cambridgeshire, is now one of the first companies in the world to mass produce graphene-based devices. His two reactors, shaped like pizza ovens, are currently producing enough graphene to make 150,000 devices per day.
These are used by Paragraf in two ways. One is to create a sensor that measures magnetic fields. These can be used to detect battery failures in e-bikes and e-scooters and prevent fires.
The second type of sensor distinguishes between bacterial and viral infections and indicates whether antibiotics are an appropriate treatment. “We also believe that using our biosensor, we can detect whether someone has sepsis within minutes,” Humphreys said.
Also important, he added, is the fact that graphene devices are likely to consume less energy than current devices.
“The era of silicon is coming to an end. The energy consumed by transistors doubles every three years, and we are reaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto a single chip.
“This means that if nothing happens and things continue as they are, silicon devices will consume all of the world's electricity generation, which poses a major threat to our net-zero goals.
“Graphene technology may have arrived later than we originally expected, but it has the potential to avoid these problems and make a huge difference to modern life.”
The hyped science failed to make the grade.
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nuclear power “Our children will have immeasurably cheap electrical energy in their homes.” – Louis Strauss, then chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954.
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Sinclair C5 “This is the future of transportation” – promotional materials for the 1985 Sinclair C5 electric scooter/car. Sales in the first year were predicted to be 100,000 units, but only 5,000 units were sold. Project has been abandoned.
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medical advances “The time has come to close the book on infectious diseases and declare that the war on epidemics has been won” – in the words of Dr. William H. Stewart, Surgeon General of the United States from 1965 to 1969.