Graphene: the Strongest Material
Graphene is the strongest known material. Graphene was discovered in 2005 and was recently tested and found to be the strongest material known to man. Mechanical engineering professors at Columbia University tested graphene's strength at the atomic level by measuring the force that it took to break it. They created indents in graphene using a tiny diamond probe. Graphene may have a promising future in the semiconductor industry by acting as transistors in microprocessors. Sound interesting? Source: Technology Review
Posted July 31st, 2008 in Materials.
This is fascinating, pure materials science. I had somehow missed the news (or forgotten) about the discovery of graphene. I did find out that one of the other promising applications that may exist for this substance is in liquid crystal devices with electrodes made of graphene. I located an article on this, just published in June ’08, by Blake, et al. BTW, I used a fairly new search capability, Science.Gov (http://www.science.gov), which is sponsored by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (http://www.osti.gov). It (and several other search tools) allow users to search deep into the web (where Google can’t), and into multiple research document databases in a single query. Really helps with ranking, too, as I don’t have a lot of free time to sift the results myself. Keep up the great work, folks!
August 27th, 2008 at 11:05 am