ERP029 - Graphene w/ Dr. Joseph Meany

Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. Today on the podcast, we're talking graphene. If you've never heard of graphene, you can bet you'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming years. Graphene is a material that quietly holds the keys to many of our next generation of technological advances. Filtering water at an atomic level, creating impossibly lightweight bulletproof materials, building a quantum supercomputer, and powering nanobots. This little known material called graphene is central to a series of fascinating technological discoveries. Dr. Meanie and his colleague Les Johnson have written a book about this amazing material and today he's here to join us on the podcast. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast from. Also, be sure to check out the web page evolvedt.com/podcast for show notes, links to my guests and to check out previous episodes. Now, let's get started. Today on the show, Dr. Joseph Meanie is with me and he is an expert on material science. We're going to be discussing the incredible powers and potentially superpowers of graphene. Welcome to the show, Joe. Thank you for having me. I reached out to on Twitter to look for some people who could talk to me about graphene. because it's something that I see coming up a lot in my news stream and just around futuristic technologies. And it's something I've been following for a while and then lately I've seen a few articles that have kind of blown my mind as to what the the capabilities of graphene are. So I really appreciate you uh you uh connecting and coming on the show to chat a little bit more about this crazy material called graphene. And uh if you could, maybe we'll just start around what is graphene and why is it so special? Yeah, so graphene is an extremely exciting material. Uh 2017 might even be called the year of graphene just because of how much excitement has been generated around it this year and I'm sure that 2018 is going to um generate just even more excitement as commercial applications really start to come to fruit. So graphene is a two-dimensional layer of carbon atoms that are arranged in a hexagonal repeating lattice. So if you think of chicken wire or chain link fence that extends out in two directions, forward and back, left and right. Um, these carbon atoms are connected in such a way going on for many tens of thousands of atoms in repeating units. that are all connected by the exact same bond. And the bond that are connects these carbon atoms is extremely strong, which lends to the strength of graphene and lends to a lot of other extremely useful, surprising and exciting properties. that scientists all over the world are seeking to leverage for all of our benefit in uh the coming years. So for kind of the the the lay person, um the way that I understand this as well is is uh graphene is essentially just single sheets if you could cut the atomic layer, layer by layer, it's essentially what's in a mechanical pencil, graphite, like if you actually shave that down, is that is that maybe not technically correct, but a good way to think of what the material is? No, actually, that's exactly right. If you take graphite, which you could just dig out of the ground, um graphite is just repeating sheets of graphene stacked on top of one another. So if you think about maybe a plate of pancakes and I'm up here in New Hampshire, so I got to have some nice pancakes with fresh maple syrup on them, that's why they're on my mind. Um, a single pancake is a graphene sheet. But you stack multiple graphene sheets on top of one another and that's what eventually leads to the mineral graphite. Um, and the crystal structure of graphite has been known since around the early 1920s. A few researchers were able to bounce some X-rays off of very large samples of crystalline graphite and they found that indeed it just comes in little uh planes or sheets that rub past and sluff off of one another. And that's why we're able to write with graphite pencils. Cool. So, uh I'll I'll maybe rattle off a couple of useful applications here that we'll get into, but just to give people an understanding of why uh we why we're obviously quite excited about what seems like a fairly um uneventful material. Like, okay, graphite, you pull it out of your pencil, like why is this so exciting? So, uh some of the the applications for this are for filtering membranes to be able to um eliminate impurities from water or other liquid materials at an uh at an atomic level. Uh it is been flagged as a potential use case uh material for superconductors. Uh potentially creating quantum computers, not out of silicon, but using uh graphene instead. Uh even looked at for some crazy properties like uh essentially limitless energy and using batteries in nano nanobots and could be potentially useful in um uh nano machines and space uh materials. All kinds of really awesome futuristic applications. Well, maybe the probably one of the places I think would be a great place to start was one of the things that I had trouble squaring in my head is when we were initially talking about this um and what topics we were going to cover. Uh I wondered, you know, what the the material applications were and you suggested that uh some of the applications that I suggested were not really that useful because the material is extremely brittle. But at the same time, it's also been uh been uh discovered that uh graphene can be essentially a really lightweight, thin, bulletproof material. Uh so, uh can you maybe explain to us how is it that researchers recently discovered that you can stop a bullet with graphene, but, you know, maybe if you if you take a a ball peen hammer, you could you could smash it to pieces. How does how does that work? How can it be so thin and brittle, yet so incredibly strong and powerful at the same time? The ability of or the news articles surrounding this bulletproofness of graphene, um, are really interesting. It's gotten a lot of traction over the past weeks and um, for by the time this airs, it'll be well after the new year. And so if you check back to the news articles around the Christmas time, you'll be able to track down these kinds of news articles. Um, and what the researchers actually found was that if you took two layers of graphene and exactly two layers of graphene, um, and that's called bilayer graphene, just for the two layers. Um, they were able to find that they applied a force with a diamond tip to this bilayer graphene. And the force that they applied, um, pushed carbon atoms between the two layers very, very closely together. And this changed the nature of the bonds between the two layers of this bilayer graphene. Um, from strong bonds within the plane only between uh the carbons in a particular sheet and instead allowed for stronger bonds to reversibly form in between sheets. And these bonds that formed in between sheets, um, had the character that was a lot similar in nature to the bonds that one would find within diamond. And so a chemist would say that this goes from an SP2, which is um, along one flat plane. And the SP3 that creates the three-dimensional building character. Um, and so the researchers found, hey, if we apply this force, conduction goes down in this graphene sheet, does this actually turn into something diamond-like? And when they followed it up with uh additional experiments, they found why indeed the stiffness and structure of the graphene sheets did in fact turn into something more diamond-like. So I would maybe imagine this uh a bit like Kevlar, right? So a single layer of Kevlar is no means going to stop a bullet, but if you put a multiple layers of Kevlar all stacked together really tightly, it creates sort of this dense core that distributes the the energy coming towards maybe a bulletproof vest, for example. What you're suggesting is rather than, you know, half inch of Kevlar material, you've got a two atom uh layer thick material, which essentially has even stronger properties than that because uh the pressure between those two layers actually pushes the force back out or redistributes it across. Is that a pretty good understanding? Uh, it's not quite like that. Okay. Um, because with Kevlar, the thicker you get, the better protection that you would get. Um, and so if you had a foot of Kevlar, that would stop bullets even better than if you had just two inches of Kevlar. But what this study actually found was that only two layers of graphene uh created this diamond diamond-like bonding effect. Um, the researchers tested it out with a single layer of graphene, two layers, five layers and 10 layers. Um, and any additional layers beyond this two, um, completely negated the effect. Um, and you could think of it that the thicker of the graphite stacks actually made everything softer, so you couldn't quite get the pressure necessary to create that, um, diamond-like bonding because too much energy had been already dissipated away. And it left indentations. Now, they did this study instead of with bullets with small uh nano-sized diamond tips to apply a really great force to a very small area. Um, so the uh bulletproofness is still a little bit um fantastic. But gives us the right direction where we want to head towards. I see. No. Also on that, uh that's an interesting point because that was one of the things I wondered about is, um, is would the graph the graphene layers uh be brittle if you applied sort of a sudden force to it versus sort of setting that diamond tip on it and then continuing to push down and apply pressure. Would the speed of the force have an influence on whether or not it be it was able to repel that force? Ooh, I would have to look at the paper again for that one. Yeah, okay. It's pretty it's pretty new. It was just a the the way that you're describing it, it seems like maybe maybe there there was some there would be some risk to that. That a sudden force might actually break it, but I guess maybe not. It would still create that that that layer bond, right? So. Yeah, and I think uh speed since speed has something to do with the uh amount of force applied to uh the material. would actually help it, um, although you would have to have an amount of the material that is able to absorb and then dissipate the uh rest of the energy from whatever projectile was firing at the um at the target. So you could imagine if you had a large enough single bilayer sheet of graphene to make a piece of body armor with. If you just wore it as say a shirt, while the bullet would stop, it would still transfer all of the kinetic energy of the bullet to the target. And so while you wouldn't have much in the way to extract a bullet out of the body, you'd still have to worry about significant internal bruising and bleeding from from just an actual bullet wound. Right. And and I think that's an important distinction as well that, you know, it's it's not like this is uh, you know, some magical armor that just deflects everything and you can walk straight through it. It's similar to any type of bulletproof material now, it's going to seriously sting and you're probably going to have some broken ribs. Uh so we're not quite to the to the to the point of deflecting this stuff without without uh injury at all. And and again, like this is a future application, we're just we're just talking about uh this because it's something that came up and it kind of speaks to this paradox of something that uh, you know, people again, if we relate it to the graphite, the mechanical pencil stuff, uh it's really brittle. I mean, you lean on that, you press on that pencil too hard and it snaps really easily. So how is that a bulletproof material? I just found that really kind of counterintuitive. So. Um, I guess uh and and if I may, um, one of the cool things that I found about this paper, um, that wasn't really highlighted in any of the news releases about it. is that the transition from graphene bilayer to this diamond-like material is actually reversible. And so when the pressure is released from the system, these SP3 bonds break and the uh graphene goes back to being its normal bilayer system. So you actually end up with something that's reusable in its protection and not a single use only. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, interesting. All right, so that that's maybe one of the the the future applications. We'll get back into some of the more fantastical stuff. But in the meantime, uh what are uh some of the more common applications for for graphene currently? And recognizing the reason that it's probably not as prevalent in more of the consumer applications or things that people are more familiar with is that as it stands, it's very expensive to produce or manufacture graphene. So this is this is a pretty pricey material that people uh until we reduce that that production cost, it's not going to be in everyday items. But uh can you maybe speak to some of the more common applications for what graphene does get used for? So one of the areas that's seeing a lot of excitement with graphene and its incorporation is actually the sports product market. Um, a number of companies these days are putting together things like racketball rackets and bike frames and um, snow jackets, ski poles, what have you. Everywhere there's supposed to be a little bit of graphene involved in the mixture to improve the physical properties of whatever this application is involved in. So, uh last year a tire manufacturer actually ended up incorporating some graphene into their tires. And what they found is a two-fold benefit that was kind of an on accident. In that when the tire rolled straight down a road or other kind of straightaway, the tire ended up being a bit more stiff in that direction. And it allowed for a lower coefficient of rolling friction that meant that you could go faster and use less energy to um start or continue pedaling your bike. But what they also found was that when stress was applied to the tire across the direction of the tire, when the biker went into a turn, that the rubber became slightly more malleable and you ended up getting better grip to the road or trail that the biker was going across. Um, meaning that the biker could lean into turns faster and just get that little bit of extra edge coming out of their racing performance. So I would expect that the next Olympics, both winter and summer, we're going to start seeing uh graphene incorporated products. Um, graphene is hydrophobic and so that means it's water repellent. So we could see that getting involved in uh winter clothes to help uh keep uh competitors dry. But at the same time, it has really good thermal conductivity, so we could see that heat is transferred from the core, keeping our extremities uh warmer for less energy output by ourselves. So makes our own internal metabolisms, um, more efficient with our working with our clothing. Would it also work on swimsuits in the same fashion being hydrophobic that it would make an easier glide for a swimmer per se? I would certainly expect so. In fact, uh there are some companies that are looking at the possibility of incorporating uh graphene layers onto the holes of boats, um to lower the coefficient of friction uh for shipping boats that'll decrease the cost of shipping because it doesn't take as much fuel to get across the ocean. Um, so absolutely with swimming caps and swimming trunks, you could probably see some sort of graphene incorporation in there that'll be really exciting. Um, even perhaps making uh swimming goggles easier to see through because a single layer of graphene is very, very transparent. Um, and so you may even see that added as an anti-fogging agent on the inside of goggles. Back in high school, I was a I was a swimmer and that was just a perennial problem, uh keeping keeping fog out of your goggles. So if you could solve that problem, instant millionaire. Yeah. Well, it's because I remember um the first time I probably heard about this uh was the Australian Olympics when that was where the more advanced technology was coming out around the suits and certainly biking technology was really taking off at that point, obviously before that, but at that point it was starting to get a lot more recognition. So I think I think uh this this is a great application that we'll see a lot more. where, you know, there's um large companies that have sponsorships or state sponsored programs where they're kind of looking for that that 2% edge wherever they can find it and this could be a really valuable application for them. Um, the the one of the other applications would be membranes. So I've I've seen some suggestion that uh graphene acts as an amazing filter and maybe you could get uh can touch on how that's possible. Potentially you could create um basically what I would understand is maybe a reverse osmosis filter where you've got uh really dirty water uh potentially polluted with some materials and and uh graphene as I understand it can act as as a filter almost on an atomic level. maybe uh elaborate on that. Yeah, you're exactly right on that. Um, your your reading has been done really well. I will point out though, um, that the material is most slated for uses within filters aren't graphene itself, but rather a chemical analog called graphene oxide. Now, graphene oxide is what you would get if you took graphene and along the surface, if you chemically bind oxygen to the surface of the molecule and you disrupt the surface of the graphene, um, with these oxygen molecules, you would actually chemically change the character of the graphene in a pretty drastic way. And what you end up with is you go from graphene, which we've already said is hydrophobic to graphene oxide, which is hydrophilic, so it actually likes to interact with water. And in these filters, the graphene oxide can be uh chemically modified and controlled in such a way. that holes through the surface of this graphene oxide are only about a nanometer or so wide, they're very, very, very tiny. And what in effect happens is that you're able to exclude um salt ions from passing through these membranes. Because each of these salt ions in order to exist, actually are surrounded by this soft shell, if you will, of water molecules. And so the size of these ions are actually excluded because of the additional size that's required from the soft shell of water molecules. But beyond a couple of water molecule layers outside of these ions, the water molecules are able to float much more freely around. And they're able to sneak their way in between the gaps of the graphene oxide films and purify themselves by moving across the pressure gradient to the other side of the graphene oxide membrane. And so this would, yeah, definitely produce a ton of excitement, particularly for areas that are really hard hit with drought or exist, um, in areas with a lot of salinated water, with a lot of sea water. So coastal areas that are hard hit by uh not a lot of natural rainfall would see a lot of benefit to these graphene oxide water filters. That would make a lot of places a lot more habitable. So I I there's been a lot of discussion in uh around the area of California about desalination and the biggest resistance that I've seen against it is that it's just incredibly costly. Would the graphene uh membranes potentially reduce the cost required for that because you wouldn't have to do it through uh like an electric process necessarily or? You're still going to have to supply some sort of power. Um, you're you're just not going to get around that little bit of physics. Um, but you can reduce that amount of power necessary, um, so that eventually once the cost of uh producing the graphene itself becomes, um, economically feasible, um, you'll you'll see a lot more possible, uh, filters being adopted. And so patents are being filed left, right, up and down, every single which way. I mean, dozens of applications for patents each week all across the world. Everybody's getting in on this graphene game, um, just because it is going to be everywhere. It's going to be absolutely ubiquitous. So one of the other areas uh wanted to touch on is a little more fantastical, but we'll put on our our future goggles uh for this is around uh the battery capacity, next gen batteries and electronics. And uh one specifically that I do want to touch on that I found really fascinating was potential for power generation. Uh so I saw this study that again is is um is a very sort of niche case and it's a very small example. But some researchers found if they cut uh a specific pattern for graphene and uh applied um uh electrodes to each side of it and put it into a state where it was basically uncomfortable. So it wants to sit in a particular pattern, they forced it into a different pattern and it essentially vibrated because it was uncomfortable in this in this uh this uh physical position that it was in. And in effect was generating uh free energy because it was it was uh the and again, this is on a very, very small scale, not this is that it's going to generate any meaningful amount of power. But it was really kind of a an amazing uh suggestion around the the idea that if you could create a a larger uh version of this. that potentially you could have maybe um a nano battery for nanobots, you know, flowing through the bloodstream, delivering medication or, you know, uh uh medical bots that are repairing uh certain tissues or or uh organs or something like that. So I thought that that was a really cool application of potentially creating these uh these batteries that generate their own energy on a very small scale. Uh so I I I recognize this is a bit outside of the the area of uh of uh of meaningful application, but uh wanted to get your your thoughts or comments on on the idea here. Oh, absolutely. Um, I'm a chemist and not a physicist. So not all of the uh aspects of the graphene research I'm able to grasp with, you know, the full appreciation for the results. But uh the co-author on my book, Les Johnson, he is a physicist and I'm sure would love to talk to people about um this more in depth. But I was taking a look at that study and they said that it was due to some phenomena phenomena called Levy flights. And the idea of limitless free energy really makes me kind of uncomfortable. Agreed. Um, the the, you know, zero point energy modules, uh, from Stargate Atlantis, um, may find their fans within this within this study. Um, but I certainly like the idea of using graphene and power generation. And actually, uh, there were some scientists last year that ended up creating a uh nuclear battery, if you will. uh using graphene because they were able to harvest graphite from the protective cases of spent uh nuclear waste. The the the fuel rods that we traditionally use. And they found that this particular graphite was enhanced in the carbon 14, which was um the radioactive form of carbon. And when they burned this graphite, turned it into a gas and then used a special form of chemical vapor deposition to turn this gaseous carbon into a form of uh C14 enriched diamond. that they were able to let this carbon 14 decay over time and generate small amounts of power as the nuclear decay went on with this particular carbon nucleus. So they were able to um basically generate. It's not free energy because the energy still comes from the nuclear rods from before, that's where the enhancement comes in. But then when the uh C14 nuclei break apart, an electron is generated with a whole lot of energy, but that electron can be captured and directed for useful work within a circuit. And so uh the scientists were imagining that they could harness this into low power applications for lightweight uh spacecraft that didn't happen to need lots of power for longer distant journeys. Uh whether that be to our more distant planets or out toward the Kyper belt. Um, or even the Ort cloud, the Ort cloud very, very far away would need um very low power for uh a long time and then a lot of power for a short time. Or even, you know, fate's willing, uh us going to the stars. Right. you mentioned another one that that sort of peaked my interest and and it crosses over with something else that we talked about. about uh I think it was uh some researchers in Japan that used um rainfall on a sheet of graphene and they basically uh the impact energy was was converted into a usable energy by uh by the graphene. Basically being being um kinetic the kinetic force hitting hitting that layer of graphene and producing some energy from that. And what occurred to me is because um the the graphene layers are transparent, you could potentially have maybe windows or solar panels that when it's not uh when it's raining and they're not able to produce energy from uh from the sun, they could potentially still be generating, although a lot less energy, but some energy from the kinetic force of rain. Is that something that that you can comment on as well? Yeah, I mean, uh finding ways to use our environment more efficiently to generate electricity is going to absolutely be a key area, um, in making electricity more cheaply and widely available to everyone around the world, particularly with the focus on getting away from burning fossil fuels. Um, and so if we're able to skirt the argument that, hey, you can't use solar panels when it's when it's raining out, well, hey, guess what? Now we can we can capture that energy from the rainfall as well. Um, so graphene being able to incorporate into all sorts of different different niches is going to be especially exciting. Very cool. Well, as a someone who hails from the wet coast uh in Vancouver, I I would appreciate being able to generate some energy from the rain as well. Well, Joe, this has been really fascinating and I appreciate you taking some time. Uh obviously, um you're you and your co-author less have a book coming out shortly, which is graphene, the super strong, super thin and super versatile material that will revolutionize the world. And that'll be available uh probably Amazon and all the other bookstores, so people that are uh interested to see more and understand more, especially the technical aspects of of graphene, uh encourage them to check that out. Um, any other parting words or uh where people can find you on social and reach out to you if they want to explore it a little further? Absolutely, I can be found at Crimson Alchemist on Twitter and most other social media accounts. Um, that's Crimson with a C, Alchemist with a K, uh, all one word. And you can find less at less author on Twitter, um, we have a graphene Facebook page that you can feel free to like. And you can pre-order our book which comes out on February 6th at tiny.cc/graphene book. Awesome. Well, uh good luck in all your future endeavors and the fascinating research that you're doing in the field. Thanks so much, Todd. It was a pleasure.