Science desk
< January 13	<< Dec \| January \| Feb >>	January 15 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 14

Could graphene ever replace macroscopic metal conductors in any home or car application?

It'd have to be stacked without increasing the ohm-meters too much, and I don't know if there's anything a middle-class person might own that could be improved by replacing some or all the macroscopic conductor with stacked graphene. Nanotech would have to get cheap enough to compete with "make the copper thicker". Could graphene ever replace wires that are thicker aluminum instead of copper for mass reasons?

Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:32, 14 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

One presumes you are referring to Ohm metres, not Ohmmeters. Mitch Ames (talk) 05:28, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that you'd see a 1--1 substitute for simple loose copper wire, since that has important metallic properties that something mostly-graphene won't replicate, even if cheap and light. (Like, you couldn't just replace phone and electric catenary lines with some graphene material because it won't stretch. But there's an awful lot of electric and telecoms infrastructure that isn't dangling copper cable, including all the new big stuff.) But see a 2022-10-11 Caltech Weekly article on some of the flexible graphene structures they're making, including a graphene coating for copper traces on silicon. A more detailed technical review of stacking graphene is in Han et al 2021 if you want to try finding something of interest. SamuelRiv (talk) 06:43, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also an interesting 2014-09-02 StackX discussion on graphene conductivity notes that the practical gains aren't anywhere as huge as the hype (1.4 times more conductive, or 5.8 times compared by weight), even assuming you can make or engineer around the issue of needing near-perfect sheets. This as opposed to the possibility of using superconductive lines for either long-range transmission (EETimes 2022-07-07) or metro-area grids (Yang et al 2020) (also not as good as the hype at present). SamuelRiv (talk) 07:20, 15 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh -- airplanes! That'd probably be the case where everything from high-performance jets to home-built hobby kits would replace any metal wiring with some mostly-graphene substitute, even if it cost 100x more per meter, since the weight savings is so much, and it's all enclosed. (You can already just use powdered graphite as a conductor (there's an Instructable for making a weak conductive glue with it), but that's altogether not great.) So I'll instead guess sooner rather than later, anything that flies would have graphene wiring if some viable product is invented, even if it's much more expensive. SamuelRiv (talk) 02:18, 16 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]