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62 The PCB Magazine • July 2015 resist reciprocating. The unique experience of meeting an Asian supplier in a land that was completely foreign to me worked, because we developed mutual respect and trust. Today, the business is still thriving due to those original positive communications. Overcoming those unbelievable challenges will forever be remem- bered as a positive, true life experience. In my view, if we had tried to do business without visiting the Asian supply source, it would have resulted in a failure. As a distributor, when asked, I am always eager to visit a supplier's plant to see how the product is made; visiting the customer puts ev- erything into its proper perspective. Knowing the product and understanding the customer's need is very important to make the supply chain successful. You will then be able to make educated decisions when issues arise. Get to know your partners. No two people are alike and one of our life challenges is to un- derstand each other so we can all meet our ex- pectations. PCB Flexing graphene may be the most basic way to control its electrical properties, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at rice uni- versity and in russia. The rice lab of Boris Yakob- son, in collaboration with researchers in moscow, found the effect is pronounced and predictable in nanocones and should apply equally to other forms of graphene. researchers discovered it may be possible to access what they call an electronic flexoelec- tric effect in which the electronic properties of a sheet of graphene can be manipulated simply by twisting. The work will be of interest to those consid- ering graphene elements in flexible touchscreens or memories that store bits by controlling electric dipole moments of carbon atoms, the researchers said. Perfect grapheme—an atom-thick sheet of carbon— is a conductor, as its atoms' electrical charges balance each other out across the plane. But curvature in gra- phene compresses the electron clouds of the bonds on the concave side and stretches them on the convex side, thus altering their electric dipole moments, the characteristic that controls how polarized atoms interact with external elec- tric fields. The researchers discovered they could calcu- late the flexoelectric effect of graphene rolled into a cone of any size and length. The researchers used density functional the- ory to compute dipole moments for individual atoms in a graphene lattice and then figure out their cumulative effect. "while the dipole moment is zero for flat graphene or cylindrical nanotubes, in between there is a family of cones, actually produced in laboratories, whose dipole moments are signifi- cant and scale linearly with cone length," Yako- bson said. The russian Federation, moscow state university, the russian academy of sciences and the air Force office of scientific research's multidis- ciplinary university research initiative supported the re- search. work at rice was supported by the air Force office of scientific research and the National science Foundation. Graphene Flexes its Electronic Muscles Fred Long is in business development at matrix electronics. Feature THE KEyS TO SUCCESS FOR SUPPLy CHAIN MANAGEMENT continues