Beware of new material claims - the case of graphene


Given that graphene is quite the in vogue material for audio applications I wonder how many (if any) of the vendors selling this are actually sourcing the real thing?

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/11/graphene-you-dont-get-what-you-pay-for
128x128folkfreak

Showing 1 response by wynpalmer4

The thing about graphene is that a lot of its amazing properties are only valid when you have continuous perfect sheets of it- something that as far as I know is impossible at the moment. It has a very high electron mobility, but that works out to produce a resistivity of about 10nohm.m in bulk, and that's only if you can make a perfect multilayer structure that maintains the properties of a single sheet. This is only about 40% better than copper which is 16.8nohm.m, and that's easy to make nearly perfect.
That conductivity is not maintained if the sheets in the multilayer structure have dislocations. So why is it better than copper?