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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-01-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh3dA8xnZ4Y
new materials have always been a pair of new technologies and subsequent sub so side tire and societal development and advances them the most simple examples would go back in history and think about the stone age which developed into the bronze stage and then it went on into the Iron Age and each age is labor by the material that was was bearing the new the new technology
on or the new society at us as a whole and every new material was better than its predecessor and it also made life simpler for the people of that age I think in the beginning it made life bearable just due to excess and that's it and this is the way we it has gone on in in our society and still today we always have new technologies
that come with the introduction of new materials or substances there's a new development that has come only in the latest decades or so and that is the ability if using basic sciences like physics chemistry combine two of material science and we are able now to atom by atom design new materials with design a phone functionalities and today I'll talk about the ultimate material which is actually
not disarmed but it has been there all the time you see a picture of it and you have been playing with it since you started to use a pen and doing the calligraphy that we just talked about so it's all about one layer of atoms but that and it's known as graffiti and this is what I'll try to spend a couple of minutes of your time
to explain graphene is amazing it's the material of superlatives best in everything this is what we are told of course this there's this is is a truth with modification and it's the truth but has to be verified but still today when we think about it it's only one atom thick or thin how you want to put it and this is a material which theorists like I
have said this is impossible any thermodynamical fluctuations will correlate up and you know when you are in a hurry and you take a blood pack and want to cover something a little close up this is that how it should behave but then these guys in Manchester under government cost over Salem said okay this is impossible let prove them prove them wrong and just try of ten
years ago the published results showing that you could actually make useful things and address the single layer of atoms this material is the strongest material we know stronger than diamond diamond isn't stable it will fall into Griffey in if you just excited with a little bit of energy over a threshold so graphene or graphite is actually the stable form of carbon and being the strongest it's
still flexible and now being the strongest one wonders what would you do but if I had a hammer of graphene here then I could put the baby and it would rest in thin air in your eyes is not that I could put the truck but a four kilo newborn child it it's another issue which is another property which is nice and that is that the task
of with a length but it has no height so it's only surface so you can address it all over so you have this big sheet you can work with and then it's strange in that sense that I can put any material substance on top of it and it won't Lapid let it through it's impermeable to other elements substances and being so thin if you take the
amount corresponding to bite of a snickers bar it's ten runs roughly you would cover three fields of three football fields of graffiti we we made a calculation it I'll talk about it going into electronics you take fifteen kilograms cover all the displays computer displays iPads whatever with Griffin it's something that I could carry along that's the world production it has other properties it's the best thermal
conductive Kerry's feet extremely well it's one of the best electrical conductors it carries charge stream oblique well and on top of this it's transparent so it lets light through and what one has seen is with all these superlative and properties you can probably make quite a lot of interesting things out of it and this is what I'm going to try do well on a little giving
you some examples and also showing little book limit what me and my colleagues are doing up Chalmers nowadays but first I thought I'll give you a crash course in science and if you take the picture here to my left you see a chicken wire with black spots in the apexes wear them that the lines meets that's the carbon atoms and they organized like this by themselves
and the reason why they do that is carbon has the possibility of making a lot of different compounds any test for electrons in its outer shell which are responsible of it is very easy it's with these nice blobs that I've shown here what happens is three of them will fall into place make something the chemist would tell you is SP tune hybridize Asian and neighboring carbon
atoms want to share electrons with each other and they do this very well as a covenant bond it's called and this bond is extremely strong this will make graffiti the strongest and also flexible material let out so mechanical properties comes from this simple elytron bonding and then we have the blue guy which is that electron which is left and you took quantum mechanics it doesn't know
if it's on top or button because have some uncertainty you should but the Senate on skates around this chicken wire with the speed of light in that material so it's basically a relativistic particle hits has no mass so it was a big excitement of course that now we can do really test fundamental physics in this material and this blue guy is responsible of the heat carrying
that electrical charge and also the transparent and no of course you can start playing around combining properties or exploring special properties as far as you can and this is something that we know of as translational nanotechnology and I show you for examples and I'll go into three perhaps a little bit more in depth the first one you see up in the left corner the possibility of
making flexible transparent electronics and this is a bit of science fiction I would take up a role off plastic it would look like it's transparent and not get today's news of whatever I'm subscribing I get the movie I get whatever so you can have a piece of material which is flexible and still communicating so it's just a new way of communication and information processing so I
see team that's information the complete communication and technology basically that's short for that we have another one which is down in the corner and you see an airplane there and US Griffin is so strong you can put it into composites and it's not only strong it's extremely light and this is quite important because now you can make big big M. chunks of this material and put
it into let's say the body of an airplane you cut the weight by a lot and the fuel costs would go down in can just do other kinds of off of vehicles basically up in the right corner you see the face of a small car which is plugged in and we all know about if you want to have electrical currents to cut fuel at all the
missions and so on and graphene this is essential and that because it has promise of making very effective batteries and supercapacitors that's batteries that load very quickly there's an idea of having supercapacitors to drive elf snob and you know there's a boat coming across here basically every time a doc's fueling up with electricity and shooting back and flip fueling up again nowadays you know that if
I want to take my iPhone nor my car I need to spend hours to get it loaded now you could do it in a few minutes and then what one thing which is very interesting you see the picture here you see a demand strength Stranmillis going through a whole which is mating drifting and the idea here is that pulling it slowly through the graffiti mash sequence
the DNA and understand more there were four scientific articles that came out the same way date is same week with the same kind of picture so what has happened with this is basically it's imagination is the limit but we still need to prove these things not want to say a little bit in debt about Griffin and here's something that came out earlier this year from a
group in Germany and they were playing around with graphene transistors in a liquid and they realized that they could operate them and and make them interact and of course there's a big problem let's say your eyes stride for some reason but yes York bishop chorus till working then you would like to connect that to something buy a compatible and give it impulses because one knows that
that you you can you can regain sight in a sense and then today you do this right now at it you know transplants but in this idea a graffiti seems to be bio compatible which means that if you let's go fiend interact with unknown so it would meander out and it's ready to take the electrical impulses you can feed it and this would do by placing
a camera just like this is that the camera would which would give the impulses it to to the to that graffiti membrane and then it would trigger impulses for this M. another important thing in today's citing it's interesting it's important but it's extremely problematic that's our need of having vehicles to get around and this is a concept car Debbie many different concept cars always around to
solve different problems but this one is now very integrated in its idea taken out by dying in this case but there are others and it's the smart car you already Dave you go to Berlin you see them like we have our bikes and yet the boy you they have their cars that you can subscribe to drive around very interesting but this car now you have integrated
you have make that made the chassis of for %HESITATION complicit material you have made the rules smart materials so it's like a solar cells so it's picking up energy from the sun which it feed back to its graphene based earned it batteries which is is driving it so it's fueling us it's going and of course you can always stop off quickly at some station and it
also could have smart material in it because you could have transparent electronic so you wind screen would be you'd display board and so on so there are lot of these ideas which I which I'm working on going in this direction I have a third example which I think is stream important because this is perhaps one of the big social some war today water water supply we
have a lot of water but ninety eight percent of it it's too salty to use people have think thought okay let's desalinated take away the soul turns out that this is an extremely energy inefficient and hard process to do and it's slow no this is based on a computer simulation where you have a divider of graffiti where you have made not no holes in it which
and you have decorated the holes bye bye who drug side and he drops a molecules and you apply a pressure gradient so it's a reverse osmosis and what you have to tuned to the right is salt water and this little hole is selected bits let's only they the the water through and leaves the salt on the other side it does is to a hundred hundred a
thousand times more efficient than any other any any other process of and available process in this kind of and in this field %HESITATION what I'm told you about now is great possibilities and of course they are still this is a computer simulation that there's no experiment yet and and and the car doesn't that system and there was only idea but that the potential of this material
has allowed the European scientists to go together and actually get the big funding from you on the on the level of a billion E. you a hero's over ten years and how it was sold to them is this funny picture I hope you don't start reading now but the idea let's focus on the color scale here to the left you have the idea of science you
have this fantastic material of superlatives you have that bright ideas of designers engineers and etcetera yup other materials once you're proving that one is possible to do two dimensional you can have more and the idea of what they said but we want to take this and we want to be able to compete two HR and and there and America's and so on and go together because
you have to make this a joint effort and the idea is that you want to take this material over ten years from the blue to the red and that means going from academia into industry and of course you can sell it on making faster computers ICT and so on and you can have energy and all these important things but the important that most important thing when
you pick the mind of the guys you need to is that we bring people together we that makes societal changes giving job opportunities education and actually working together this was what they were interested in ask them what should I tell you in five years and is it well it wasn't so important that all the big gains in technology of course they're important but but it was
this that we could work together because we're seventeen countries their of close to two hundred groups working together okay that was a little bit about visions and so on that's talk a little bit more about how it's produced there's several ways of producing graphene the first when you heard about it you take some tape use it takes some well defined graphite and you start ripping it
apart like this take six rips and you have Griffin even the king can do it anyone can do it under guidance it's extremely easy but you need a microscope you need to have the ideas and of course and then you have to find it that's very hard because you get a square micrometers micrometer of this so you have to find it so of course we want
to make high speed electronics so you have do this to you have silicon carbide and you evaporates the first layer of silicon and you get very nice compatible with within their with the electronics industry and in fact in Linn shipping within our projects we have the first Griffin and producing companies Sweden you have done in the right corner you put graphite illiquid and you shake it
with ultrasound and it falls apart and that you can print that you make printed electronic switches superseding any printed in attendance today the thing that my colleagues do it in at Shamus is known as chemical vapor deposition that means that you put the hot played to some metal in a furnace and you introduce communist gases and that does dissociate and the carbon falls down on the
metal and by self termination it makes a single layer of of Griffey and if the guys we are sort of competing with in the Asia already made a hundred meters twenty centimeters apart and of course this is now possible for all kinds of applications %HESITATION what they doing now clean room is them they make the defeat by the CBD they use a approaches which is close
to a battery process to bubble off the graffiti and then you see a picture the size of it's limited in our place by the size of our furnace but in principle in high used to say that all these fantastic things were going to do with this size of my thumb so we need to scale up the lid as you understand but the ideas this week we
can make the Griffin and we can now go on and into our research this is also too busy please don't try to do it and understand everything of this picture but the essence of this picture is that we have groups that are making vertically emitting lasers for communication purposes you have fiber to your homes some