Nixene Journal Volume 9 Issue 5 Article 28

When I was studying Chemistry, I remember being fascinated by a massive wood and glass cabinet at the college entrance. It was a periodic table containing actual samples of the elements. The lasting impression was how many of the elements were metals. Non-metals are in the minority. There is method in my recollection. A few weeks ago, a new form of carbon was announced by a team in the USA. They call it U-carbon and it is metallic. It conducts electricity, is magnetic and the sample they have made looks just like a highly polished metal mirror. Carbon is not a metal. Or is it? U-carbon is a layered combination of 2D and 3D material. This one will keep scientists arguing about definitions for some time to come. In the meantime, the applications for something that is mirror-like, has a very high melting point, is electrically and thermally conductive as well as magnetic and extremely hard, will be myriad. U-carbon is something to watch. Another research project hit the headlines this month. The University of Arkansas announced they had made a device using graphene that extracts limitless electrical energy from Brownian motion. I spent several days with two of the smartest people I know to figure out what was actually going on here because this work appears to invalidate earlier work by Richard Feynman. We think we’ve got to the bottom of this and while their device works at the small scale, we think they will encounter problems scaling up and discover that Richard was right all along. Time will tell. Yet more fascinating work has been done by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They have made a new material; a graphene-copper metal composite. This is a new shear forming technique for making metal components and wires from powders. This shows 5% improved electrical conductivity compared with copper. General Motors is already working with this to lightweight their electric vehicles. We can see huge opportunities in space and clean energy where lightweighting electrically conductive copper will be a significant leap forward. Chinese electronics hardware company MSI has embraced graphene composites. Their latest graphics card has a casing made from a graphene enhanced polymer that is four times stronger and conducts heat sixteen times better than the normal plastic they used for the casing. Another eye-catching development was made by researchers at the University of Surrey. They have found that adding small amounts of graphene to an acrylate-based polymer makes it look like a green opalescent material. More importantly its colour changes red when squeezed and blue when stretched. This is reversible. It also responds to temperature too, losing its colour irreversibly above a set temperature. This means they have created a sensor that does not need batteries. As usual there is so much more in this issue, the pace of this field is astonishing. Adrian Nixon, 1st November 2020

I need to start this month’s issue with a correction. In the last issue (Vol 5 iss 3 p.13) I stated that Kostya was moving from Singapore to Russia. Thanks to our rather well-informed readership, I have been told that Kostya is indeed taking up the position of head of the Brain and Consciousness Research Centre in Moscow, Russia. However, he is not leaving the National University of Singapore. Onward with our usual Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity. Normal ABC service resumes. This month we had a meeting with Prof. James Tour and the GEIC. Thanks Debbie. The work on Flash Graphene (FG) is advancing faster than we realised. Prof. Tour testified to Congress about the benefits graphene can bring to buildings and infrastructure in the USA. He testified to Congress in 2017 and now said “Four years later I’m here to report that the future has arrived” (see page 21). You will know that FG can be made from anything that contains carbon. Waste plastic is a favourite (Vol 4 iss 8 p.9). We learned that Flash Graphene can now also be made from furnace black, the by-product from the leading ‘green’ manufacturing process for Hydrogen (see page 22). The Rice University laboratories and spin out company, Universal Matter, are working on the production of Flash Graphene. The pace is fast. Every nine weeks doubles the scale at which FG can be made. Flash Graphene is something we’ll watch closely. If the team can continue to scale up the process it has the potential to make many other methods for making graphene powders obsolete. We have three special features this month. A review the state of the industry for manufacturing large scale sheet graphene, and interviews with two graphene company business leaders, Maví Figueres and Dylan Banks. Such is the pace of change, while we were writing the special feature, General Graphene sent samples of their monolayer and multilayer graphene to the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC). The samples will be sent to the International Space Station (ISS) for testing. We have the first pictures of these large-scale graphene samples in this issue (see page 29) It is worth noting that Graphene has gone from impossible to industrial in just 17 years. Astonishing. Other things to draw your attention to include an emerging controversy with graphene facemasks in Canada (see page 30) and new perovskite 2D materials start to feature in this issue. You’ll discover more as you read on. Adrian Nixon, 1st April 2021