If I wanted to write an
exhaustive article about everything scientists have proposed using graphene
for, I would be typing for a long time. There are encyclopedic websites that
you can go to if you want to spend the next several weeks reading about graphene-based
bomb detectors or how to give your car the greatest rust-proofing in the
universe. Instead I’m going to spell out the 5 uses of graphene that I think
are the most amazing and most likely to change the world:
1) Super-capacitors
A capacitor is a device
that can take the place of a battery and power a piece of electronic equipment
using energy stored in carbon. The problem with capacitors for a long time has
been that they don’t hold much of a charge per unit of weight. The thing about
graphene is that it is ridiculously light (0.77 grams per meter squared) and
has a maximum surface area that anything can have.
Imagine electrons as tennis balls, and imagine
the carbon inside of a capacitor as a cube that is coated in Velcro. You can
stick a certain number of tennis balls onto your Velcro cube, but eventually
you’re going to run out of space. If you cut the cube in half, you increase its
surface area and you can attach a few more tennis balls. Now imagine that you
were able to cut the cube into sheets that were one atom thick (minus the
Velcro). If your original cube was 1mX1mX1m, you would need about 1.5 trillion
tennis balls to cover all of your single-atom sheets. That’s a lot of tennis
balls. That’s translates into a lot of electrons, and a lot of stored energy. A
superconductor using graphene would be able to recharge in minutes or seconds
and last for an impossibly long time. Imagine an electric car that you could
recharge in 5 minutes and drive for a few weeks in between charges. That would
change the world.
2) Fuel Cells
This one is pretty
similar to supercapacitors, except replace electrons/tennis balls with
hydrogen. Hydrogen can bind with the carbon in graphene and be used to fuel
cars. Since graphene is lightweight and has incredible surface area, a fuel
cell that incorporates graphene as a binding agent could make fuel celled cars
a practical reality.
3) Lightning-Fast Circuits
Graphene is able to conduct electricity
amazingly well. It’s super-fast and super-efficient. It has also been
experimentally used to create circuit boards that could make a laptop 50 times
faster and never need a cooling fan. The coolest part? Some people think that
graphene circuit boards could be on the market in as little as 5 years.
4) Solar Cells
As we now know, graphene is the Rolls Royce of
electrical conduction. That translates into awesome potential for things like
solar panels. A panel that used graphene as its conductor and carbon nanotubes (CNT's) to absorb light and transfer electrons would be cheaper, lighter, and faster
than anything we can conceive of today. Imagine driving your supercapacitor car
with a graphene solar panel on the roof constantly recharging it. Road trip,
anyone?
5) Disease Diagnostics
Last but not least, there is the potential to
use graphene to diagnose diseases. This takes a bit of explaining, but if
you’ve read this far it’s probably safe to say you’re at least vaguely
interested. First off, graphene is able to bind with certain molecules that are
sensitive to various diseases, call these “fluorescent molecules.” These
molecules can also bind with DNA. If you want to make a graphene sensor for
detecting disease, you take some DNA with markers for that disease and bind it
with some fluorescent molecules. Then you bind your wacky DNA-fluorescent
molecule to a piece of graphene. Next, take your sensor and put it in a
science-type beaker with a DNA sample from a sick person. When a piece of DNA
with the same markers as the DNA on the graphene floats by, it sticks to the
sensor and creates a double-strand of DNA. The double strand breaks away and
can be detected by looking for the fluorescent molecules. The awesome thing
about graphene is that its incredible surface area allows you to test for an
incredible amount of diseases at the same time. Imagine being able to test for
every kind of cancer known to man simultaneously and to detect the disease at
its earliest stages. Sign me up.
So there it is. Call me
an optimist, but I can’t wait to fly by Geoff’s house in my supercapacitor
powered car, blasting music from my iPod that never runs out of battery, on my
way to the other side of the country, on my 150th birthday,
without stopping to recharge. I’ll toss him a shirt that says “I was totally
wrong.”
