"Miracle material" discovered: Unbreakable smartphones to become a reality

Have you ever wished that your smartphones would come with a much stronger and sturdier build? Or the smartphone be built from a tough material that would make the devices last much longer?

Well, your wish might just be granted. With innovation constantly going on the in the technology arena, researchers have now discovered a new compound for making smartphone and its parts. They are dubbing it as the "miracle material" and reportedly this material comes with improved chemical stability, lightness, and flexibility. Scientists are claiming that if manufacturers use this material to make smartphones and other devices it would not break.

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While manufacturers have been searching for a material that is more durable and less costly, researchers from Queen's University Belfast in the UK might have just come up with this solution.
They have been experimenting for a while and the have possibly discovered the miracle material. They have claimed that the experiments included combining semiconducting molecules C60 with layered materials, such as graphene and hBN. And by doing so, they produced a unique material technology.

Further, hBN is said to provide stability, electronic compatibility, and isolation charge to graphene while C60 transforms sunlight into electricity. So smart devices made from this material would benefit from the mix of unique features, which do not exist in materials naturally.

Researchers term the process as van der Waals solids, and it basically allows compounds to be brought together and assembled in a pre-defined way. "Our findings show that this new 'miracle material' has similar physical properties to Silicon but it has improved chemical stability, lightness, and flexibility, which could potentially be used in smart devices and would be much less likely to break," said Elton Santos from Queen's University.

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"The material also could mean that devices use less energy than before because of the device architecture so the devices could have improved battery life and less electric shocks," he added.

However, researchers have stated that there is an issue that still needs to be solved. "Graphene and the new material architecture is lacking a 'band gap', which is the key to the on-off switching operations performed by electronic devices." But again, the team is already experimenting and looking at a potential solution.

This material could soon replace the silicon and other compounds that are currently used in manufacturing most of the parts of the smartphone. And we could soon have better and tougher smartphones that would not break that easily.