Graphene Armor

Who would have thought that the thinnest material known to mankind could have the strength to stop a bullet? Well, that’s exactly what researchers, working with NASA and the military, are experimenting with.

Graphene – sheets of carbon just one atom thick – has some pretty amazing properties. One hundred and fifty times stronger than steel and two hundred and fifty times more conductive than silicon, it’s also pliable enough to be stretched to 120 percent of its length. But this latest research demonstrated something that hadn’t been tested before – namely, graphene’s ability to absorb an impact.

Impact resistance is all about distributing stress over a large area. In order to test this, microscopic “bullets” were fired at graphene sheets at a speed of three kilometers per second (that’s faster than an AK47 fires bullets). High speed cameras were used to capture the impacts on varying thickness of graphene to observe how the energy was absorbed. The tests indicate that graphene distributed the impact faster than any known material and was ten times better than the same weight of steel at taking a hit. Future applications will likely include lightweight, bullet-proof fabrics for law enforcement and military personnel, as well as micro-meteor shielding for spacecraft.