It could be soon be used to make planes according to Virgin Airline’s boss Richard Branson.
Branson is advocating that commercial airplanes made with graphene within the next 10 years.
The Daily Telegraph reports that in a speech in Seattle Branson is touting the lightweight material as a “breakthrough technology” that could “revolutionize” the airline industry.
By making airliners many times lighter, airlines like Virgin Atlantic could save on fuel, which is the biggest factor in profit margins.
Branson was speaking in the American city , where the airline has just begun flying on a daily basis for the first time:
‘Graphene is even lighter [than carbon fibre], many times lighter and many times stronger,’ he said. ‘Hopefully graphene can be the planes of the future, if you go 10 years down the line. They would be massively lighter than the current planes, which again would make a difference on fuel burn.’”
The two-dimensional layer of carbon atoms forming a regular hexagonal pattern, formulated at at the University of Manchester in 2004 has the potential to revolutionise a large number of applications including, high-performance composites for the automotive and aerospace industries, as well as flexible, bendable mobile phones and tablets and next-generation energy storage, and is also said to be as light as a feather yet 200 times stronger than the strongest steel.
Although the product has yet to be started, Virgin superiors are confident it could revolutionise the way the planes consume fuel. “If you take all the steel plants and all the aluminium plants around the world and take all the shit that goes up the chimneys, and then you turn that into jet aviation fuel, something like 30-40 percent could be powered that way. The question is: are they going to be able to scale it up enough to really make a difference?” Sir Richard said.
