How ‘transparent’ is graphene?
The amazing electrical, optical and strength properties of graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon, have been extensively researched over the last decade. Recently, the material has been studied as a coating that might confer electrical conductivity while maintaining other properties of the underlying material.But the “transparency” of such a graphene coating to wetting — a measure of the degree to which liquids spread out or bead up on a surface — is not as absolute as some researchers had thought. New research at MIT shows that for materials with intermediate wettability, graphene does preserve the properties of the underlying material. But for more extreme cases — superhydrophobic surfaces, which intensely repel water, or superhydrophilic ones, which cause water to spread out — an added layer of graphene does significantly change the way coated materials behave.That’s important, because these extreme cases are generally of greatest interest. For example, coating a superhydrophobic...