Developments In New Materials

In 2004 two researchers in Manchester pulled layers off a lump of graphite using ordinary adhesive tape until what was left was a single sheet of carbon atoms. That sheet, graphene, turned out to be the strongest material ever measured, an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and almost transparent. Six years later the work won a Nobel Prize. Two decades on, you still cannot buy a graphene saucepan, and the reason why is the most useful lesson in this topic.

New materials do not arrive because somebody wanted them. They arrive when a process makes them possible, and they enter products only when the process makes them affordable. This lesson covers the four groups the specification names: developments made through the invention of new or improved processes, such as graphene, metal foams and titanium; alterations to perform a particular function, such as coated metals, liquid crystal displays and nanomaterials; smart materials, whose properties can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external stimuli; and composite materials, including reinforced plastics, glass reinforcement, carbon fibre reinforcement and manufactured timber boards. This is core technical principles content, examined in Section A of Paper 1, where it supplied two of the specimen paper's multiple choice questions.