Why Prince William And Kate Middleton Toured The National Graphene Institute
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MANCHESTER, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 14: Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge during their October 14, 2016 visit to Manchester, England. (Photo by Darren Staples – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
The visit was part of a daylong jaunt through the northwest English city of Manchester that included stops at a future engineering campus, a World War I memorial, a children’s hospice and a soccer museum.
A primer on graphene and why it’s important: You may know that diamond is a form of the element carbon. Well, graphene is also. Chemists call these different forms allotropes. Don’t confuse graphene and graphite— yet another form of carbon that we use in pencil “lead”. (And no, there’s no actual lead in pencils nowadays.)
As a material, graphene is as thin as they come. It is a sheet of carbon just a single atom thick, with the atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. That may sound delicate. But in fact, graphene is 200 times stronger than steel, extremely flexible, and practically transparent. It conducts electricity better than copper— as in the metal we’ve used in electrical wiring since the 1800s.
Graphene’s combination of properties has scientists and engineers salivating about all kinds of potential applications. Could graphene be a viable alternative to silicon in ultra-tiny computer chips? How about flexible touchscreens made with bendy graphene electrodes? Every article about graphene seems to suggest another futuristic idea. Yet for all the hype, graphene’s commercial success is still very much up in the air. Which brings me to the royal visit.
Norman is a highly experienced technology director with more than 25 years international working experience. Now returned to the UK after spells in Belgium, Malaysia (twice) and the US, his…
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