Transcriber: Manisha Sharma Reviewer: Ayyappadas Vijayakumar
[TEDx Chennai Institute of Technology ] [CountDown]
Greetings to everyone. I’m Lalit Kishor R. currently pursuing my third year
bachelor's in electrical and electronics engineering.
We all have our mobile phones.
And for it to fully charge,
it takes about one to one and half hours and for an electric car,
it takes about eight to 10.
And the charges and batteries in both mobile phones
and electric cars use copper wiring.
And there is a better alternative for copper,
which has about 70 percent higher electrical conductivity than copper
and can decrease the charging time. And that material is graphene.
Graphene is often called as the wonder material of the 21st century.
It is just one atom thick layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb like pattern,
and this thickness is the main reason for its electrical conductivity.
And to put simply, the brilliance of it, it is stronger than Diamond,
more electrically conductive than copper and is more flexible than rubber.
It has the potential to revolutionize industries in fields like power generation
where it can be used to make efficient solar panels
and in fields like electrical vehicles manufacturing. But the
Application which interests me the most is the change it can make in
the electrical workers industry.
One of the main reason why people opt
for gasoline powered cars rather than electric cars is that charging can take
a lot of time.
If we use graphene in the charges and batteries of electric vehicles,
the charging time can be decreased by up to 70 percent,
which could possibly increase the number of electric cars in the roads.
Electric cars are the need of the hour as they are
an important part in battling climate change.
However, no greenhouse emissions come directly from the electric vehicles.
The electricity that they use to charge themselves still comes from power plants,
which use fossil fuels. But
the current emissions can be cut down by up to 43 percent,
which is still in sort of improvement.
Graphene can offer us many ways for a sustainable way of living.
And one such is. The average lifespan of electric car.
Of electronic goods is from three to 13 years and are disposed after that.
Recycling electronic goods isn't like recycling paper.
They are difficult to recycle because of their complex design and
the variety of materials used to manufacture it.
And sometimes recycling electronic goods can cost more than the worth of
the materials. And according to a database company called Statista,
the global electronic goods waste reached
a record height of up to fifty three point six million tonnes in 2019,
and graphene can offer a solution to it.
Imagine if graphene can replace the glass plastic hood,
even some hardware parts in the smartphones.
The smartphones would become highly durable and reducing the waste generated.
And carbon capture technology,
which is a method to capture the carbon dioxide which is emitted into
the atmosphere and the captured carbon is then stored in deep sea winds
or deep underground. It uses a silicon membrane which captures and filters
the carbon particles and according to
the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Status Report,
which was published in 2020.
About 40 megatons of carbon is captured annually and is stored,
which is just 0.1 percent of the total carbon emissions.
And meanwhile, the E P Hatchell
Basic School of Sciences created a carbon filter,
which is made out of graphene,
and it surpassed the efficiency of other carbon filters.
A self told by the researchers in
the E P Hatchell Basic School of Sciences it has
a separation factor of about twenty two point five and can increase
the carbon capture by up to 10 times.
And but the main problem with graphene is that it cannot be mass-produced.
That is, it cannot be synthesized in large amounts.
And the key reason is the cost.
And this high cost of graphene has also slowed
the global commercialization of graphene, and more recently in 2021,
Indian Institute of Technology Partner came up with
the cheap way to produce graphene by using plasma gun
and gas face ions at just $1.12 per gram
and can produce up to 48 grams in an hour.
And this quest for a more affordable
and more efficient way to produce graphene is not going to stop.
And just like the first discovered metal by early humans, which is copper,
which helped people civilize, develop
and forever change the fate of humanity which we are now
and just
I firmly believe that graphene can bring
the same scale of change in our technological advancements without any
adverse effect to the environment and can be
the key to our future sustainable way of living. Thank you.