Engineering Team Discovers Graphene’s Weakness

If you owned a mechanical device made out of the strongest material known to mankind, wouldn't you want to know under what circumstances it might fail?. Marianetti, whose research focuses on modeling the behavior of materials at the atomic scale, was interested in the properties of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon with myriad high-tech applications including smaller computers and longer-lasting batteries. Graphene has been in the news of late. This fall, two British scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for their research on the material. In 2008, experiments at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science established pure graphene as the strongest material known to mankind. James Hone , an associate professor of mechanical engineering, described it at the time as 200 times stronger than structural steel, noting that it would take an elephant to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of plastic wrap. Hone, along with Jeffrey Kysar , associate professor of mechanical engineering, were part of the four-person team that proved graphene's unrivaled strength.