That's really cool

 

Badass! Even if it is a nail in the coffin to internal combustion, it also has the capacity to make EV tech more readily available to the average consumer.

 

If they can get these to work well. This really can be the death of the internal combustion engine. Batteries have always been the limiting factor of electric vehicles. Very interesting.

 

I remember when the Noble Prize was awarded to two scientist doing experiments with graphene, well, I remember my chemistry professor's reaction to it, between her ecstatic response, and our conversation in the following lab section, we concluded that we can only come up with any application it can't be used with are applications that require a plastic type material (deforms and doesn't return back to its original shape)
this was in late 2010, outside of electronics, graphene has some staggering applications in material science and in structures, a square meter (if memory serves) of a single layer of graphene can support 8 pounds, graphene is a single layer of atoms, imagine a bicycle or even a car's body made out of this

while some ground breaking advances have been made with battery technology and with applications for graphene, this still hasn't ended the usefulness of internal combustion engines, I honestly thought the great killer of IC engines was going to be a few years back when a lab produced a battery that used an altered virus as the anode of a battery thus allowing it to be downsized dramatically (if memory serves, Popular Science did an article on it), so your basic laptop battery could be scaled down to the size of a triple A (honestly, I think it was smaller than that), I think that was back in 2008, I'm still waiting to see this in practice

 

funny about the timing of this thread, this just popped onto my facebook feed

Worlds Smallest Petrol Engine…

Scientists have created the smallest petrol engine in the world (less than a centimeter long not even half an inch),small enough to power a watch or any small gadget.The mini-motor which runs for two years on a single squirt of lighter fuel is set to revolutionize technology associated with it. It generates 700 times more energy than a conventional battery. It could be used to operate laptops and mobile phones for months doing away with the need for charging.

Experts believe it could be phasing out batteries in such items within just six years. The engine, minute enough to be balanced on a fingertip, has been produced by engineers at the University of Birmingham. At present, charging an ordinary battery to deliver one unit of energy involves putting 2,000 units into it. The little engine, because energy is produced locally, is far more effective.

One of the main problems faced by engineers who have tried to produce micro motors in the past has been the levels of heat produced. The engines got so hot they burned themselves out and could not be re-used. The Birmingham team overcame this by using heat-resistant materials such as ceramic and silicon carbide.

I will pay pal one dollar to whomever can say what page posted this

edit: the page just took down this post, I so I still can't say if this is real or not, I will give three dollars to whomever can name the page that posted this

 

funny about the timing of this thread, this just popped onto my facebook feed


I will pay pal one dollar to whomever can say what page posted this

edit: the page just took down this post, I so I still can't say if this is real or not, I will give three dollars to whomever can name the page that posted this

Worlds Smallest Petrol Engine - Well Done Stuff !
Micro-engines to power next-gen PDAs, PCs, phones ? The Register
New mini petrol engine | The Sun |News

 

You know, the only problem with technology like this is the fact that we don't really live in a world that values the betterment of people's lives, so much as the lining of their own pockets. I can only see these technologies being viable from a business standpoint if they are equally, or more, profitable than the technologies they replace. A battery that would run on an insanely inexpensive fuel such as lighter fluid would be amazing; but then the consumer battery industry would go belly up. I doubt the powers that be would let that happen.

 

Why is this not all over the news? This looks like the future of all vehicles

 

They are too busy telling about how one of the Kardashians almost picked their nose one time last week and Kanye's take on the whole "mess". Because they are terrified the standard lowest common denominator stupid American might change the channel and go watch something else.

I call it "The Springer Effect".

 

well, it was over the news for maybe 6 hours when the two scientists go the Noble Prize back in 2010, but that is pretty much it

anyone ever think the world would suddenly get better if everyone going on TV was required to take an IQ test?

 

The reason we do not see stuff like this is cost. Graphene, just a few years ago was the most expensive substance on earth, it has since gone down allot in price, however, we are still talking about extremely small amounts, to build something like a supercapacitor out of this stuff you would be looking at millions of dollars, that is assuming it even worked.

It's just like when we rediscovered Graphene, the computer/IC market was all a buzz about it, and how SiC was going to be thrown out for it with new 300GHz CPU's...But guess what? It has not happened, cost, testing etc all play a role in what comes to market. There are things out there that are far better for given products and markets, but are not used because of raw cost, or impractical tooling etc for the material.

 

no, at not one point has graphene been remotely close to being the most expensive substance on earth, that title is currently being held by antimatter, at around one billion euros per gram and last I heard (via the Science Channel), it will take around a century to make

the reason for the huge price tag for graphene is because of what it is, a single layer of atoms on a two dimensional plans, manufacturing that is extremely expensive, which I'm pretty sure is vapor deposition, which if the cost has dramatically dropped over the last few years, it still will be, what people don't remember is carbon nano tubes, which is basically a cylindrical version of graphene, and has similar applications as graphene, while I can't compare the two as I am not skilled in the field of nano materials (although my dad is), I can say we have established capability in nano tubes right now and I know that it can be made a bit cheaper (relatively speaking) although it is limited but not as fledgling as graphene, I foresee carbon nano tubes being put into practice with electronics before graphene is, it is possible by then we will have super conductors that can operate above livable temperatures for human life before then

 

"Although graphene powder can already be made in industrial quantities, sheet graphene is still difficult to make and currently ranks as probably the most expensive material on the planet. Today a micromechanically cleaved graphene crystallite smaller than the thickness of a human hair can cost more than $1,000."

For just a square centimeter of it at that time was over $1M, so yes, right up there with antimatter. The price today has dropped allot, however, the amounts needed to make a battery/supercap would still run millions. Which again, is why we do not see products like this on the market.

 

that is completely accurate, but that is graphene on its own, if it is manufactored on a substrate (surface of another material), the cost plummets, like around $100 per square centimeter (why thank you wikipedia), which ultimately be where applications come from (at least in my opinion of extremely limited ability in electronics), to build a battery, you need a conductor, an insulator and another conductor, and so on, then a cathode and an anode, all of this is in an acidic solution within a housing and you have the anode and cathode as the outlets as the positive and negative sides of the battery (and this is as far as my understanding goes, although I might have mixed how capacitors and batteries work), I could only speculate that because graphene itself a single layer of atoms, that could ultimately be the limiting factors with the use of an acid, or graphene could be what makes super capacitors able to be built on a huge scale, which could be what replaces batteries in hybrid drive systems (over a battery that wears out from being drained and recharged, a capacitor by design doesn't) or even in electric cars

honestly, it might be more likely that graphene will be the holy grail with semi conductor electronics, or at least in the near future, I can't speculate that much beyond what I have already stated as I don't have experence in this field, also physics magazines have a large price tag on the subscriptions and I don't understand (yet) how the physics and chemistry involved works