Underrr.... PRESSURE!
Great. Now I have Bowie and Queen stuck in my head.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... er, Graphene bubbles – 200 times stronger than Superman
Tiny graphene bubbles can withstand enormous pressures and are 200 times stronger than steel, according to scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK. Results published today in Nature Communications reveal yet another superior property in graphene, also known as the "miracle material." Stacking graphene on top of …
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Friday 26th August 2016 04:09 GMT asdf
Re: Underrr.... PRESSURE!
Badly off topic but the only other version of that song I could ever stand was when Bowie did it with Annie Lennox at Freddie's Tribute concert. That was the highlight of show along with Plant doing Crazy Little Thing and also for the record fsck Axl on this homophobe apology tour for ruining the night.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 22:10 GMT Clive Galway
Ekaterina Khestanova, a PhD student who performed the experiments, believes the pressurised bubbles could be used to prevent liquids from freezing.
"Such pressures are enough to modify the properties of a material trapped inside the bubbles and, for example, can force crystallization of a liquid well above its normal freezing temperature," she said
Eh? Isn't she saying the exact opposite? Sounds to me like she is saying you can get it to freeze at a higher temperature.
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Friday 26th August 2016 08:51 GMT Wilco
Re: Gigapascals?
Since you asked
area of pin head = 2mm^2 = 2 * 10^-6 m^2
mass of an african bush elephant = 6000 kg
force exerted by elephant on earth = 6000 * 9.8 = 58,800 N
1 pascal = 1 N / m^2
Pressure of 1 elephant standing on tippy toe on a pin head
58,800 / 2 * 10^-6 = 58,800 * 10^6 / 2 = 29.4 gigapascals
Therefore 29 and a bit elephants
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Friday 26th August 2016 05:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Tensile strength ?
Everyone was raving a few years back that we had the materials that we could build a space elevator from, except their tensile strength hadn't been properly tested so we didn't know their breaking length, and whether they would work.
Since then I haven't seen any new mention of measuring the tensile strength of these materials.
Why would that be ?
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Friday 26th August 2016 10:40 GMT Aqua Marina
Re: Tensile strength ?
From memory, 2 of the competing companies in the field that were doing all the research had quite literally bet their owners assets on the technology, and when the economy crashed a few years ago they lost the roofs over their heads. Not due to a failure of the technology or the research. but more to the fact that over the course of days any money and assets they had simply vapourised.
I saw a documentary about these guys recently, one of them still can't afford a car, and the other one quit the field, and went and got another job in marine engineering, ironically where a lot of the research he did on the elevator, could be put into practice.
There was a third guy who at one point had worked for both of the guys above. He was essentially the brains, and he decided to quit completely because he had worked out that the breakthroughs were predictable, and were about a hundred years away, and he would never get to see them in his lifetime, so he would rather work on something he knew he would be able to complete.
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Friday 26th August 2016 15:59 GMT Scroticus Canis
Re: Tensile strength ?
Saw an article in one of the pop science mags recently about the fact that one carbon atom out of place in a graphene ribbon/cord and its tensile strength drops dramatically thus knackering any hope of using this for an orbital tether. Just can't make it flawless for usable lengths.
From the article it sounds like these bubbles are not graphene but contaminants between a graphene layer and substrate layer. How do they get the contaminants out to leave a half bubble or are they pressue testing the "bubbles" contents? Aren't buckyballs graphene bubbles?
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Friday 26th August 2016 07:25 GMT Doctor_Wibble
Just some guy in tights and a cape
Sorry, that was right there, and shame on anyone who doesn't remember that one!
Though back to relevance, it's always the mistakes and imperfect stuff that's the most interesting, so well done to them for turning 'interesting' into 'quite possibly really useful'.
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Friday 26th August 2016 23:13 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Just some guy in tights and a cape
Though back to relevance, it's always the mistakes and imperfect stuff that's the most interesting, so well done to them for turning 'interesting' into 'quite possibly really useful'.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries,
is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
Isaac Asimov
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
