4 ms·

It stops working above 30% relative humidity, so practical applications are unfortunately still far off.

• beloch 11y ago
  It could work in a sealed system, such as a hard-drive bearing or a flywheel similar to what is used in some hybrid vehicles. Flywheels are a pretty exciting application actually. They're basically mechanical capacitors. The upper limit on the energy they can store is determined by the tensile strength of the material used for the rotor, but the bearings the rotor spins on are responsible for how long energy can be stored before being transformed into heat. Magnetic bearings are far more efficient than mechanical bearings, but are costly to implement. A mechanical bearing system with a graphene and nano-diamond coating could allow us to produce flywheels that are simple, cheap, and able to store energy for a long period of time. This might even make flywheels a viable alternative to chemical batteries in some applications.