Description
This edition starts the new decade with a special thought leadership feature published here for the first time. I interviewed three of the leading figures in the world of graphene and 2D materials. You will be familiar with the Nobel prizewinning scientists who isolated and characterised graphene, setting off a whole new field of physics and materials science, with billions of dollars of investment around the world. Last month you will recall we encountered Prof. Kostya Novoselov. This month we have Prof. Andre Geim. I had the pleasure of interviewing Andre live on stage at the National Graphene Institute (NGI) in Manchester, UK where he was the star attraction at the graphene industry showcase event.
The write up of the interview will be published by the University of Manchester later this month. You get the first private view, here. The text you will read is rather special too it is written as an interview. The answers to my questions were written by Andre himself, we worked over a weekend to make sure the text accurately represented his views. We are also working on a podcast based on the audio recording of the live event. Please contact us if you would like to listen to this and we will make sure you receive a link when it is published.
As well as talking with the top people in the field, we have been keeping our close watch on things technical and commercial. On the technical side we are starting to see graphene like materials being made for spintronics, which could open the way for smaller faster computers. New graphene copper composites have been made that seem to have much better heat transfer properties than existing materials. Rodney Ruoff’s team in Korea has crosslinked layers of graphene that could lead to coatings with very hard, diamond-like properties.
On the commercial side, we see another large container ship has been coated with a graphene anticorrosion primer. This joins its sister ship at sea for the next 12 -18 months and we will watch the progress on this real world trial. XG Sciences and Perpetuus are also collaborating in the USA making graphene-rubber composites for car tyres. We already know that graphene will increase the grip, reduce rolling resistance and extend the life of the tyre, so we can expect this to start making the news in 2020.
As usual this is just the tip of the iceberg and there is far more to read in this issue.
Adrian Nixon,
1st January 2020
