Sorry for only having the pic of inside the Megaton store.

sorry but he wasnt really asking you. please, let the expert speak.

sorry but he wasnt really asking you. please, let the expert speak.

They grow it in a very hot furnace, feel free to ask questions, I'm using it in my dissertation.

Graphene can only be made in very very small sheets (think 5 micrometers square and only a few nanometers thick) so it is predominantly used in other materials, my dissertation for example is using it to reinforce plastic with the aim of creating super strong super light plastics. So no it doesn't lose its properties when place in other materials.

Being a crystal refers to the chemical structure that it has and isn't related to how transparent it is. Graphene and other fullerene based products such as carbon nanotubes are black and generally turn anything that you put them in also very black and opaque. So no it probably couldnt be used in making glass.

EDIT: did some research, people have started to create larger graphene sheets.

It isn't used on its own, it is used to reinforce other materials for two reasons.
1) it would be very impractical very expensive (and I'm not sure if it is currently possible) to create a graphene sheet that is the size of say a plate of armour.
2) This content is a bit misleading as it doesn't define "stronger" because something is strong than another material it doesn't mean that it won't fail before the weaker material. For example:

Steel is very strong in tension (if you try to pull it apart) and will withstand great forces without catastrophically failing. concrete on the other hand is pathetic in tension and will fail very quickly and abruptly. However putting concrete in compression (crushing it) increases its ability to withstand forces by ten fold making it in some respects "stronger" than steel.

Going back to the original question my project is to create super strong super light materials. I'm doing this by incorporating graphene into plastics. If it goes 100% correctly I will have a material that is stronger lighter and more flexible than steel with higher resistance to heat. However creating the material is very time consuming and expensive meaning that we are far off creating armour from it.

See #51 kinda the same question, but yeah, it would probably fail in a different way to a metal sword. Metal will bend and deform, whereas something like graphene with a crystal structure would break clean off without deforming (think of a broken plate). In terms of keeping its sharpness, like diamonds it would be very strong.

As with all of the other answers you wouldn't use it as a large sheet of pure graphene as it is expensive hard to make and cannot be made at sizes that are larger than a powder. However placing it into other materials to structurally improve then is definitely possible.

I've noticed that all of these questions talk about the mechanical properties of graphene. It also has incredible electrical and thermal properties.

Interesting question, since stronger doesn't necessarily mean in every which way. It might have really bad tension, since it's not a metal I don't think, so maybe it couldn't handle bullets well. austinpowerz, please mention me in the reply!

I'll get to this question later, going to uni now

Is it really expensive?

What I mean is why doesn't the military use it! The description makes it sound light, so why even bother with Kevlar for SWAT or anything?

I see. Thanks for the clarification.

i know. Is that supposed to answer the question? I know nonmetals are typically more brittle and have worse tension. Is it the same case here.

Well are we talking about one layer? I suppose that would be ridiculous. I owner how many layers it would take to make it bulletproof.

four billion kitchen knives. one after the other, through sheer attrition

Maybe it was made square to begin with...