I see articles about how graphene is this super material that can hold a ton of weight and is magnitudes stronger than steel. would the stuff be bullet proof? would you even be able to see it causes it’s 1 atoms thick ? can you even feel it?
In: Chemistry
You would either have to have it as a film on a surface of something else, or any slight perturbations would cause it to fold in on itself. Hexagonal rings like the carbon that graphene is made of are very strongly attracted to each other through Van Der Waals interactions, so the sheet would very much spontaneously “like” to fold upon itself. If it were all crinkled up like a crumpled sheet of paper, it might lose a lot of its notable properties that graphene is known for. Certain arrangements of stacked graphene have been shown to have really nice conductive (electrical flow) properties, but the arrangements of the sheet have to be very specific. With a more or less randomly crumpled sheet, these properties would not take place, and it might actually end up having some resistive or solenoid-like properties due to various currents flowing in different directions. My best guess is it would end up having a lot more properties like graphite than graphene at this point.
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