seeing a big shift into construction materials dr lisa scullion is application manager at the graphene engineering innovation center or geic based at the university of manchester in the uk you can increase the strength of your material concrete for example in such a way that you can actually use less concrete what we're seeing when we put graphene into concrete is that we get huge amounts of early strength so we get very very high tensile strength um in the first few days of the concrete curing we get less water ingress we get less corrosive iron ingress into the concrete so it's really multifunctional in may NUMBER_TOKEN nationwide engineering in partnership with the geic became the world's first construction firm to lay a graphene concrete slab in a commercial setting for a new gym that's being built near stonehenge to make its new product concrete the company put tiny amounts of graphene into what's otherwise a fairly standard concrete mix strengthening the material by around NUMBER_TOKEN percent and giving it anti-cracking properties too crucially it can be used just like normal concrete without the need for extra training or equipment when mixing or laying it companies like nationwide they've taken a big risk in actually constructing with graphene concrete because obviously there's lots of regulations around concrete and the industry doesn't necessarily move very quickly and i think because they've started to take risks a lot of other people are now wanting to take those risks too in fact they already are NUMBER_TOKENd printed graphene enhanced concrete is set to be deployed on one of the world's biggest infrastructure projects hsNUMBER_TOKEN the uk's second high-speed rail scheme for the main line out of london houston parts of the retaining walls we made from concrete that's NUMBER_TOKENd printed by machines microscopic strands of graphene will be applied to the mix making the material so strong that no steel reinforcement will be needed replacing rebar doesn't just mean less material it can make sites safer offer more flexibility and save time which is just what's needed on a project that's been more than a little controversial elsewhere in the world of transport graphene has already proven to be an effective additive for surfaces like roads and runways at rome's fumicino airport a new type of graphene enhanced tarmac has been trialled which its creators claim is twice as long lasting as regular asphalt developed by eta keemiker the material called gpav combines graphene with a special type of plastic that's not normally recycled it's also been used on roads including one in oxfordshire here a NUMBER_TOKEN meter stretch was upgraded with the material to make it less likely to crack in cold and wet weather that's what leads to potholes one of the few things guaranteed to send a british person into a full-blown rage as well as being used to increase strength graphene can be mixed into liquid coatings which are then applied to structures for a specific purpose like preventing corrosion chinese firm the sixth element materials found that adding just one percent of graphene to one of its coatings allowed it to reduce the amount of zinc used by NUMBER_TOKEN percent that's another material that can be harmful to the environment when applying the coating to steel bridges and wind turbines built around sea water which is what causes the corrosion they found it could last twice as long as regular
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