Gold is a high-quality hedge hedging tool, favored by investors. Especially in recent years, with the increasing instability of the world economy, gold has become one of the preferred asset allocations of investors because of its functions of hedging and fighting inflation.
Earlier, the worsening situation in Ukraine sent gold prices soaring to a two-year high of $2,070 an ounce. But gold, along with other commodities, fell back last week as conditions changed and bulls took profits, hitting a low of $1,895 an ounce. Rising gold prices may also have an impact on the graphene prices.
According to China Business News, Goldman Sachs raised its gold price forecast in early March, considering Asian buyers’ gold consumption demand, investment demand and central bank gold purchase demand continue to rise. Three -, six – and 12-month targets were raised to $2,300, $2,500 and $2,500 an ounce, respectively, from $1,950, $2,050 and $2,150. The last time all three accelerated was in 2010-11 when gold prices rose nearly 70%.
The World Gold Council has also noted that global gold demand is at its highest level in nearly two years, which is linked to a recovery in consumption and consumer sentiment to combat inflation.
What is graphene
Graphene is a new material made up of a single layer of carbon atoms packed tightly together to form a hexagonal honeycomb lattice. In other words, it is a two-dimensional carbon material, an allotrope of the element carbon.
Graphene has only 0.142 nanometers of molecular bonds and 0.335 nanometers of crystal plane spacing. It’s much shorter than a bacterium, about four atoms in size.
So far, graphene is the thinnest compound ever found. It is only one atom thick. It is also the lightest material and the best conductor of electricity in the world.
Humans and graphene
Graphene has been found in nature since 1948. But at the time, it was very difficult to separate graphene from the monolayer structure, because the graphene was all clumped together, and it was like graphite, and every millimeter of graphite contained about three million layers of graphene.
So for a long time, graphene was thought to be nonexistent.
It wasn’t until 2004 that scientists Andrei Geim and Konstantin Voselov from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom found a way to isolate graphene. They found that if graphite sheets were peeled from highly-oriented pyrolytic graphite, they could be successfully separated by attaching the two sides of the sheets to a special tape and tearing the tape apart.
By doing this over and over again, you can make the sheets thinner and thinner, and you end up with a special sheet of carbon atoms, which is graphene. Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the Nobel Prize for discovering graphene.
The king of materials — graphene
When graphene was discovered, it completely changed the landscape of scientific research around the world. Because graphene turns out to be the thinnest material in the world, one gram of graphene is enough to cover a standard football pitch.
In addition, graphene has excellent thermal and electrical properties. Pure, defection-free monolayer graphene has a high thermal conductivity of 5300W/ Mk, the highest thermal conductivity of any carbon material known to mankind.
In addition, graphene conducts electricity very well. Graphene has a carrier mobility of 15,000m2/(Vs) at room temperature, which is more than 10 times that of silicon, the most commonly used material.
Inside graphene, carbon atoms are arranged like barbed wire. This arrangement of atoms gives graphene its unique flexibility, making it harder than ever. In addition to the barbed wire and honeycomb structure formed by carbon atoms, each carbon atom is perpendicular to the orbital of the layer, resulting in the formation of large bonds that can penetrate atoms, which also gives graphene excellent thermal and electrical properties.
Graphene applications
The discovery of graphene has not only opened the eyes of science to the possibility of the movement and action of various particles, but also changed our lives in many aspects.
New energy batteries are the first foothold for graphene technology. At present, the commonly used battery is the lithium battery. Although the lithium battery is enough to store a large amount of electric energy for our use, the disadvantage of lithium battery is that its wear is too serious, and each use of discharge and charging will make the life of lithium battery shorter.
The application of graphene material greatly improves the capacity and charging efficiency of batteries, and it also plays an important role in improving battery life. If the graphene tin oxide layer is used as the anode of a lithium battery, the battery will last longer after being charged, and the battery will be used and recharged with very little loss.
In summary, graphene can make batteries last longer and have higher capacity.
In addition to batteries, graphene could also be used to make flexible materials because of its softness. One of the most representative is the flexible display.
The South Korean institute has successfully produced flexible transparent displays using layers of graphene and fiberglass polyester sheets. Although the project is still under development and has not been put into actual production or market, according to the imagination of the project staff, perhaps one day, mobile phones equipped with flexible displays made of graphene will completely change the impression of “bricks” of mobile phones. Phones can be folded like silly putty.
Graphene is also being used to protect the environment, most notably in desalination.
Water interacts with the graphene to create a channel of just 0.9 nanometers across. Molecules smaller than that can easily pass through the channel, while those larger get stuck. So, using graphene, you can remove the larger molecules of salt from seawater, so that the desalination of seawater can be successfully achieved.
Because of its excellent properties and unique properties, graphene has made a lot of achievements in many scientific fields.
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Chile's government has decided to create a state-owned lithium enterprise and hopes to establish a model for the company by the end of the year, Mining Minister Marcela Hernando said in an interview.
Chile is the world's second largest lithium producer and has the largest reserves of lithium in the world. The domestic lithium industry is currently dominated by two private companies, Albemarle and SQM.
Chile wants to participate more closely in the booming lithium market after leftist President Gabriel Boric took office in March. The accelerating electrification of the global auto industry has helped push prices of lithium, a key raw material for electric car batteries, to record highs over the past year, lapping up more players, including Mexico and Argentina, who want a piece of the market.
According to Hernando, the government is setting up a task force to determine the best way to run state-owned lithium enterprises. She said the government hopes to establish plans by the end of the year for how the company will develop and what business model it will operate under.
Hernando stressed that while the state would be a major shareholder in the proposed company, it was open to private investment.
Luoyang Tongrun Nano Technology (TRUNNANO) is a global chemical material supplier providing high-quality chemicals and Nanomaterials including graphite powder, 3D printing powder, the graphene.
