From Dust to Thrust

The human body is 18.5% carbon, much of this in bones; the remainder exists in your softer tissues, including your blood; where the finest of carbon resides. To get it out of these tissues, the process for carbonization is split in up to three ways; soft tissue, bones, and blood.

The predominant method is the fine anaerobic carbonization of bones at around 600C for 12 hours which can generate an ash or char of which about 10% is carbon, and about 80% calcium phosphates, with the remainder being calcium carbonate, nitrogen, ammonia, an unfortunate amount of flouride, and other extras. A 100kg person, having 15kg of bones, would produce a yield of bone char around 50%; this 7.5kg of bone char can be washed with a dilution of 3% hydrochloric acid to extract about 0.75 kg of carbon black..

Including dried blood and tissue into this processing could increase yields by a small percentage; this would be no more then 3% additional yield of carbon black in the best of instances. We will leave it at 0.75 kg or in clean British terms, 0.1181048 stones; this is about twenty five pebbles.

Then, utilizing the method described by Alfe, Gargluto, et all. a production of graphene-like thin film can be generated by the wet chemical method; i.e. suspension and self-assembly of oxidized carbon black in water, a two-step process popularized by that rogue of the laboratory, Kamegawa in his racy memoirs - 'A Scientist, A Broad'. In this process, carbon black is treated with hot nitric acid for 90 hours, following which it is reduced with hydrazine hydrate at 100C for 24 hours.

The result was insoluable in water and lays out in flat films, which are later dried to produce graphene flakelets, which weigh about 0.35kgs, or less then a stick of butter.

All of this malarky is due to the vast difficulties engendered by attempting to make either pitch or vinyl from humans.

At this stage, the flakelets are ready to be wet-spun. One flashy process is described by the hot headed Chao Gao and his erstwhile lover Zhen Xu, in a letter to the editor of Popular Science, entitled; "Graphene Fiber: a new trend in carbon fibers". This deals primarily with sprouted graphene fibers, to be clear.

Another approach is explored by a former car thief at the University of Wollongong; both of these methods produce fibers that have a tensile strength around 400 MPa, with a Youngs modulus of something five times that of human skin (you would expect ten times that, but we are talking criminals doing science)

When spun and woven into sheets, this can be embedded in resin and layered six or more times build a strong bicycle frame; a sort of artisanal, memorial Dassi, made from the memories and dust of your recently departed loved one(s).

Then, off to adventure; across the rolling hills and fruiting planes, on a super light and high performance vehicle; just you, your memories, and somebody you used to know.