Graphene makes light work of aircraft design

Faster and lighter aircraft could be built using an incredible super-thin material just one atom thick, according to new research conducted at The University of Manchester. Writing in the journal Advanced Materials , a team of materials scientists and physicists say graphene has the potential to replace carbon fibres in high performance materials that are used to build aircraft. Graphene - discovered in 2004 by physicists Prof Andre Geim and Dr Kostya Novoselov at The University of Manchester - is a two-dimensional layer of carbon atoms that resembles chicken wire. As well as being an excellent conductor of electrons, with the potential to replace silicon, graphene is also one of the stiffest-known materials. A recent study found it to be the strongest material ever measured. A University of Manchester team, which included Dr Novoselov, put a single graphene sheet between two layers of polymer and used a technique called Raman spectroscopy to measure how the carbon bonds responded when the graphene was stretched. Raman spectroscopy works by shining a laser light onto a molecule and then collecting and analysing the wavelength and intensity of the resulting scattered light.