(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Dr. Tour's team at Rice University in Texas can make graphene (about a kg/day) from garbage. A business hopes to scale up production to a ton per day in a year or two.
Just a "super-hot" flash of electricity aimed at a carbon-containing substance breaks the chemical bonds to re-order the atoms. Other elements in the substance escape as gases, leaving only the one-atom-thick lattice which is graphene.
Not only garbage, but anything containing carbon can be used for the process. That includes plastic water bottles and worn-out tires. Worthless trash that we struggle to handle now could be turned into something of great value. One more benefit . . carbon from that decomposing trash would now be captured in stable graphene and kept out of the environment.
"Mountains of plastic could be reduced to their component molecules and repurposed into something useful."
What an incredible innovation!
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
According to the writer at Forbes, this breakthrough process may mean that the whole materials industry is going to be transformed. Amazingly, ounce per ounce, it's 200x stronger than steel yet light weight and stretchable.
Industries are anxious to use it. Ford Motor Co. has been putting it in every vehicle they make since 2020. The cost of using it in manufacturing will go down now that there's a less expensive way to get it.
Cement is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions. If concrete is produced with just 0.03% of it being graphene, the resulting concrete is 25% stronger. So construction companies could use a quarter less concrete. How much carbon emission would that save? Very much -- an amount equal to the annual emissions of the nation of Brazil.
Medically there are ways to use graphene as well. Here's how Dr. Tour's team created graphene nanoribbons which were used to repair the spinal cord in a rat by enabling nerve cells to reconnect. If you make it through all the chemistry, you'll learn near the end that this method might in the future reconnect optic nerves in the eye.
Graphene was created years ago (2004), a wonderful new innovative material that got science and technology people excited because there are so many ways it could be used.
How big is an atom? That's how thin it is: a single layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded, "extremely strong, stable, and conductive."
But discovery is not enough. Methods to produce it must be explored. As you would expect, the cheaper and easier way produces lower quality, while high quality is harder and more expensive. That's why graphene hasn't gone main stream yet, even with its promising features.
A breakthrough was achieved three years ago. A team led by Dr. James Tour at Rice University published their research in 2020 showing a method that's both cheap and relatively easy, that produces graphene using carbon-based "household refuse."
Yes, it's a little like alchemy, making gold from garbage.
from Forbes
(cont'd tomorrow)
An elevator to take people and payload up to space? It sounds totally crazy. But efforts are already underway in Japan and China to build one. And NASA agrees that the basic idea is sound.
"Colossal" is the word to describe it, intended to go 22,000 feet high into the region where satellites move in synchronous orbit around the earth.
Steel is way too heavy to use for the tether that holds it to the ground. But the wondrous newly-available graphene might do the job, if it can somehow be manufactured into a tether that long.
from NBCNews
