New carbon-based amorphous material "harder than diamond"

[TTK Ciar]

Some clever gents gently broke buckyballs "to form a disordered nano-clustered graphene-based hard phase with more than 90% elastic recovery after deformation", a novel amorphous material with extraordinarily high hardness and compressive strength:

https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwab140/39584180/nwab140.pdf
 

From what I can tell this creates layers of graphene-like platelets with enmeshed edges.  Now that we know what it looks like, maybe it can be synthesized from graphene rather than buckyballs, for slightly more economical mass production.

[sunday]

Looks very promising. Perhaps cutting inserts for machining could be among the first applications, replacing diamond coatings.

[KV7]

Depending on the temperature, glassy carbon can be produced so that it's internal structure is largely distorted graphene (low temperature glassy carbon) or a mixture of distorted graphene and distorted fullerene (high temperature glassy carbon). This new material has superior performance and even higher proportion of fullerene than high temperate glassy carbon.

Edited October 7, 2021 by KV7

[KV7]

Re above:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352847820301684