Graphene has found many uses as a protective material, including adding rust-resistance to care, boats, and airplanes. A team of scientists out of the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently published findings on just how effective that protection is.

In the team’s research, recently published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, they used artificially produced air made to be highly corrosive, then observed what happens when graphene-treated materials were exposed to it. 

“Simply by imparting oxygen gas molecules with a slight kinetic energy, we could extract information about decades-worth of corrosion in a minute,” Hisato Yamaguchi, lead project researcher told Mirage. “We create a portion of air artificially, including oxygen with a physics-defined energy distribution, and expose that to graphene-protected metals.”

By controlling the environment to be much more corrosive than it would be under ordinary conditions, the research team was able to see the effect of rust on metal protected with graphene over years or decades in just a short time.

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