Concrete may have found it's killer app in graphene, according to the CEO of a British-based composites company.
A graphene oxide aerogel produced by Conversium and designed to replace standard industrial-grade concrete.
Source: Conversium via Flickr
According to Paul Cooper, chief executive of Conversium, a company that develops materials using graphene and its derivatives, the material can be used to create stronger and lighter beams of concrete, and could do away with the need for steel reinforcement bars.
The material could also be used to create new lightweight and strong composites that could be used in construction and the automotive industry.
Cooper said his team has been using it to create a stronger concrete beam with the thickness of a thumbnail, said the Guardian. He says the new material could allow the concrete industry to make bigger structures with lighter weight than they are able to achieve now, reducing the carbon footprint of projects.
“We’re taking advantage of nanotechnology to create a very strong and lightweight conglomerate, and that’s not something that has been done before,” Cooper told the BBC. “Our tests have shown that they can be much stronger than the Portland cement currently used to make concrete.”
The company launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to produce the concrete.
Graphene is the newest member of the carbon family, a one-atom thick sheet of carbon that is only stable when it is rolled up into one-dimensional carbon nanotubes. The material, derived from graphite, is much stronger than steel and has applications in structural composites, electronics and photonics.
There are two types of graphene, which have different carbon to hydrogen ratios. “Buckypaper,” a flexible thin film of graphene produced by Conversium, is comprised mostly of single-atom thick sheets and can withstand “tensile stress higher than other materials and can be recycled back to its original shape,” according to the company’s website.
Graphene has been used before to create lightweight concrete but the material has proved problematic, according to a University of Melbourne professor of engineering, Alan Dowding.
“Graphene has been used to make ‘supercrete’, but its low mass made it prohibitively expensive for use in construction,” Dowding told the Guardian. He added that the potential use of graphene in concrete meant that there had been a “great deal of hysteria” about the material, and that the “real problem” with the material was that it was not viable on a commercial scale.
Graphene is able to withstand compression and tension much more than other materials, according to Suk Chung, director of the Carbon Research Group at Queen’s University Belfast. “The big problem is that graphene alone will never do anything. As in any composite material, you need to have the right mix of materials, otherwise it will not be strong,” he said.
Graphene has been in use since the 1940s, but its potential impact on the composites industry has not been fully realised because of technological issues, according to Dowding.
“All materials, whether they are composite materials like concrete or metals, have to have a continuous interface so they can transfer the forces between materials,” he said. “In order to get that into a composite the materials need to be made into fibers. The problem with graphene is that you can’t weave it into yarn.
“You have to make it into fibers that can be spun or otherwise transformed to form yarn,” he added. “There are now several techniques, but they require development before they become commercially viable, which is why it hasn’t been commercialized.”
Conversium was founded in 2014, and currently produces its own graphene for composite products. “It’s the next step in making technology viable,” Cooper said, according to the Guardian.
Cooper told BBC Radio 4: “Conversium’s first product will be a composite which offers a high strength-to-weight ratio. What will that look like? This is a material we’re making that will turn into concrete like asphalt or bricks and, crucially, it will be twice as strong as standard concrete, and 20% lighter.
“Imagine if someone could lay a single roadbed on an area the size of London. It would only take a couple of hours. It could be used in construction or road building.”
LONDON — Scientists say they have been able to replicate the way that carbon nanotubes create conductive pathways in a new way, which is easier to manufacture.
The new technique could help bring carbon nanotubes into electronic applications that use them to improve memory and communications.
Carbon nanotubes are microscopic, hollow tubes that have several benefits.
One of the major benefits of nanotubes is that they are very strong, able to hold up to 500 times their own weight.
Carbon nanotubes can also be modified to conduct electricity better, which makes them useful for creating circuits, transistors, and antennae that work in conditions that would damage other materials, according to a 2009 paper.
The ability to control the conductive pathways of nanotubes has also sparked the idea that they could be used to improve current computing methods.
“I think there is a general trend that nanotech will have a big impact in these areas — but as I have been saying, we have not yet seen it live up to that promise,” said Eric Mazur, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the new study.
Carbon nanotubes act as fibers for the conduction of electricity in a flexible film, but the quality of the film and the density of the fiber in the film are often unpredictable, according to an abstract of the study published in Nature Nanotechnology.
Researchers found the best way to produce conductive, flexible films is by using what they call a “bottom-up” assembly process.
Instead of using existing nanotubes, the film was built from the bottom up by sticking the nanotubes to a metal substrate. The metal would be used to create a conductive circuit.
While the creation process is time-consuming, the researchers found it was simpler and more reliable than existing methods that require the tubes to grow naturally in a chemical vapor deposition chamber, with the metal catalyst on a glass substrate.
“This bottom-up assembly process makes the conductive network grow much more uniform,” said Zhen Chen, associate professor in the materials science and engineering division at Michigan State University. “Since the growth process is under well-controlled conditions, we can reliably produce large-area, uniform, flexible films with very few defects.”
According to the researchers, flexible and transparent carbon nanotube films can be used in wearable electronics, flexible displays, touchscreens, electronic inks, and chemical sensing, among other applications.
The researchers will continue work to increase the production of carbon nanotube films.
LONDON — The British government announced a £20 billion (US$24.15 billion) investment in new technology Thursday, including a cash injection for the development of quantum computers and robots that can detect cancer.
The investment, announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, will see £3 billion spent on quantum computing and £7 billion on medical innovation.
The research aims to tackle future threats to the British economy and help create and sustain companies which produce the technologies that will continue to shape the global economy in the coming decades.
Professor Steve Furber, a professor of engineering at the University of Manchester, said the £20 billion investment would help produce the research and development in the field that Britain would need to maintain its status as a leading economic power.
“The UK is not really a country which comes up with new technologies,” said Professor Furber, who is also director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics at the university. “It’s a country which is known for technology — and what the UK needs is to have the expertise in all these fields so that we can feed off each other.”
The decision to put a £20 billion annual investment in Britain’s economy was announced as part of a new Industrial Strategy intended to boost long-term growth.
The new funding will go toward projects including electric cars, driverless cars, and renewable energy technologies.
The chancellor announced a further £750 million (US$891.76 million) for space technology, a £300 million (US$362.1 million) boost for artificial intelligence research, and a £250 million (US$302.5 million) initiative to develop robotics.
The funding announcement will also see £350 million (US$420 million) invested in the growth of manufacturing in the domestic supply chain and £500 million (US$601.6 million) invested in digital infrastructure, as well as in space technology.
The announcement was hailed as “a step forward” by technology sector trade group techUK, which estimated that public funding alone will now add around £1 billion (US$1.23 billion) a year to the economy.
“I think they are just trying to make the research base big enough,” he told the Guardian.
Mr. Furber said quantum computing has the potential to be extremely useful but will require a major boost in funding in
