So, it was announced today that the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics go to two dudes "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material Graphene".
We’ve been told that these materials are just the greatest thing ever and have tons of wonderful applications. Well, it is now starting to stretch into the DECADES timeframe for these materials. Has there been a single general use product benefiting from these?
Will there ever?
Note: “Ever” is defined as within a reasonable timespan. This means before I get too old and grumpy to use any of these cool new applications. Next 20-25 years.
Research takes time, but it is progressing. You have to understand that manipulating these things is a major task. Nevertheless, there are breakthroughs being made all of the time.
Currently, as produced CNTs have lots of amorphous carbon and metal catalysts. Even after removing all of that, you have semi-conducting and metallic tubes. There are a few tricks to separating them, but none are perfect. Nevertheless, progress is steady enough that I expect them to be in wide use in the next three years. Here is what they will be used for.
There are things other than CNT that can be used for most of these devices, but CNT has several advantages over the others. For one thing, the starting material is relatively abundant, so we won’t need to deal with bad countries for rare elements. Also, as electronic circuits become more of a problem, things like migration issues become more problematic. CNTs do not have a problem with migration.
It was decades between E=MC^2 and the Trinity blast as well. Soon after the first application we had commericial reactors powering cities and ships. The first step between science accepting a theory as valid and a practical application of the theory is rarely achieved quickly. This patience is forgotten in a modern society that has come to expect thier TV’s and cell phones to be obsolete every three years. What good is a new born?
Carbon nanotubes have been used in racquet sports for the last 5 years or so (Wilson’s nCode line for example). They make for extremely light and durable racquets.
It stands to reason if they’re being used for tennis and racquetball racquets, they’re being used in other day-to-day capacities as well.
Slight hijack, but I am still very impressed that Novoselov is 36 freaking years old. How many people get the Nobel Prize for their PhD dissertation work? And after only 6 years?
(Carol Greider did last year, but not for over 20 years later).
It’s cool that the Nobel committee recognised Novoselov, who was Geim’s PhD student at the time the research was done (a mere 6 years ago). He’s currently 36 years old - not a bad accomplishment for your mid 30s!
Although Novoselov is now a prof at Manchester, there’s an interesting parallel with Jim Heath, who was the PhD student who actually first made C60 in the lab of Richard Smalley. Heath is now a big time prof at Caltech, but didn’t get the Nobel prize for C60, probably because there wasn’t room on the ticket. (He might get one on his own, though, the way he’s going).
In 2006, they were “swirled into the frame” of the bike that won the Tour de France. That article indicates they had been “sprinkled into cranks and other components to reduce weight and provide additional strength” for some time before that.
They’re also used in nerve regeneration and other medical procedures and a few years ago there was hope that they’d make solar panels more efficient, but I’m not sure how that’s going.
While there’s no barrier, in principle, to building a nanofiber space elevator like they describe, I think their timetable is far too optimistic (and mostly out of their hands). Let the techniques be developed for Earth-bound (and short-term-profitable) nanofiber applications, and then let’s look at the elevator.
It does seem bizarre to give a Nobel for an “applied” physics discovery and not wait until its actually proven to be useful. Last year they gave it to the discoverers of CCDs and someone that did work on fiber-optics, both inventions that have been around for many years and proven to be transformative. Graphene’s usefulness seems almost completely theoretical at this point.
Graphene has been described as a better electrical conductor than copper. If true, this could revolutionize electric motor technology short term. The weight of conductors has been a limiting factor in electric vehicles. One of the limiting factors in integrating electric motors in car wheels has been the weight factor affecting the suspension requirements.
Electrical applications sound more practical in short term application than space elevators, but once again, it has to be proven out. And even then, it has to meet practical considerations for cost and manufacturing.
It’s more complex than that. You have to account for the cost of disposal for all that used scotch tape, the little plastic dispensers, and the rest of the pencil. What would you do with all those left over erasers?
A better method would be extracting the excess carbon that causes global warming. It probably won’t work, but it would be green, so there’s probably lots of money available for the research.
