If you want to say what new equipment is the hottest now? Everyone will think of drones and robots. If which new technology is the hottest? That is undoubtedly 3D printing. What about new materials? Many people think of graphene. Its thickness is only 1/200,000th that of a human hair, but its strength is 200 times that of steel. It is the thinnest, lightest and strongest material known in the world.

1. What is graphene
First of all, it is composed of carbon atoms, which has the characteristics of both graphite and olefins. Graphite is a hexagonal three-dimensional layered structure, and olefin is a two-dimensional plane symmetrical structure. The comprehensive authoritative definition is: Graphene is a two-dimensional carbon nanomaterial composed of carbon atoms with sp² hybrid orbitals forming a hexagonal honeycomb lattice.

2. Why is it so popular
Graphene is ultra-thin, ultra-light, super-strong, and has many magical properties, so it is known as the "king of new materials".

• Ultra thin

1 mm thick graphite flakes = 3 million graphene sheets

• Ultra light

Take a piece of graphene airgel the size of a jujube and place it on animal hair. Animal hair can support the graphene airgel, and there is almost no deformation when observed by the naked eye.

• Super strong

If the perfect graphene film can be made into a plastic wrap, the graphene plastic wrap can be covered on the top of the cup, and an elephant can sit on it to break it, which is enough to see its strength.

3. The "treasure" torn out of the tape

In 2004, two scientists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, peeled off graphite flakes from highly oriented pyrolytic graphite, and then stuck the two sides of the flakes on a special adhesive tape On the top, tear off the tape, and the graphite sheet can be divided into two. Repeatedly doing this, the flakes get thinner and thinner, and finally you get a flake made of only one layer of carbon atoms, which is graphene.

In fact, graphene already exists in nature. For example, graphite with a thickness of 1 mm contains about 3 million layers of graphene. If a pencil is lightly drawn across the paper, the traces left may be several layers of graphene. However, as early as more than 70 years ago, theoretical research showed that a perfect two-dimensional structure crystal cannot exist stably in a non-absolute zero environment, and it is difficult to peel off a single-layer structure. As a result, graphene was not discovered until 2004.

4. What is it useful for?

Graphene has incredible physical properties that are revolutionary for a wide variety of fields. For example, it can be used as a touch screen because it is a transparent conductive film; it can also be used as an ultra-fast integrated circuit, because the electrons in graphene run very fast, and the electron mobility at room temperature exceeds 10 times that of silicon materials; it is Lightweight and high-strength materials have very important application prospects in the aerospace field; its electromagnetic shielding properties can also be used to make stealth aircraft and stealth materials...

In addition to industrial applications, graphene can also be used in our daily necessities, such as graphene vests, graphene down jackets, graphene scarf and other graphene home thermal products.

In addition to the above applications, graphene is often used in aerospace, new energy, electronic information, furniture and other fields due to its unique optical and mechanical properties to become a real "treasure" type of "black technology"!