Carbon is a modest element, one of the most common in the entire world. And, yet, it keeps surprising us with its versatility. Like, for example, this latest application… making a body armor twice as effective as Kevlar.
We’ve known that atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms, better known as graphene, have some pretty amazing properties. They can do everything from make your booze more powerful to create batteries that charge in minutes and last for weeks. Still, the body armor idea was, at best, theoretical, and hard to test.
But researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst figured out a way so awesome we need to quote it from the New Scientist report:
[Researchers] used a laser pulse to superheat gold filaments until they vaporised, acting like gunpowder to fire a micron-size glass bullet into 10 to 100 sheets of graphene at 3000 meters per second
“What’d you do at work today?” “I exploded gold with a laser to save people’s lives.” This is why science is amazing, people.
The one downside is how graphene is so effective; essentially, it cracks, making the armor less effective if you get shot twice. Believe it or not, that’s actually a fairly common problem with body armor, and the team believes that they can solve it by creating a composite, sandwiching the graphene between layers of something else.
There’s still a lot of work to do. We have to create that composite, of course, and it needs to be tested. Body armor that can only take one bullet isn’t really the most effective armor. On the other hand, if the tests come together, we could have safer police and soldiers, and that’s always a good thing.