14 DAY TRIAL // One would think that metals are already pretty strong on their own. After all, they are used in everything from impact-proof cars to scyscrapers.
Many architects don't agree, though. As humanity advances (and grows in number), buildings, cars, metal ropes, conductive wires, they all have to advance too.
There's a limit to how much pressure and tension materials can bear though.
Fortunately, that limit may very well be removed for the near future, and it's all thanks to graphene.
That's right, that material expected to make super-transistors, better headphones, super camera sensors and solar-power paint can strengthen metals.
And not just by a little. Adding 0.00004% worth of weight in graphene can increase the strength of materials by hundreds of times. Up to 500, to be precise.
To do it, you need to take a thin film of metal and “grow” a layer of graphene on top of it, through chemical vapor deposition.
Scientists from the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) were able to make multi-layered metal-graphene sandwiches that way.
Nickel was rendered 180 times tougher and copper got 500% harder to break. We can only hope that the process will be quickly implemented on a wide scale.