Nanotube Sheets
Posted by Nathaniel.
This sounds really amazing. Is it as cool to those of you who actually deal with physical objects in your research?
Researchers produce strong, transparent carbon nanotube sheets
Posted by Nathaniel.
This sounds really amazing. Is it as cool to those of you who actually deal with physical objects in your research?
Researchers produce strong, transparent carbon nanotube sheets
August 19th, 2005 at 6:01 pm Using
Wow!
That’s really exciting. Like the article stated, achieving this in the dry phase is critical for scaling up nanotube spinning and weaving to industrial levels. To do something similar in liquid phase, your tubes have to be so short (no more than a micron or few, I’d wager) that the resulting assembly nowhwere near as useful as a dry phase product, which, from what the article is hinting at, they can probably achieve with tubes running out to tens of microns or more. Heck, they’ve already got 7 square meters/minute, which is almost a third as fast as the standard rate for something as commonplace as wool.
Simply put, all those pipe-dream nanotech “elevator-to-space” ideas folks love to toss about just became dramatically more realizable as a result of this new achievement. We’re still a ways off from mass quantities of macroscopically long single tubes (which, among other things, would mean the best golf clubs, fishing poles, and baseball bats ever), but the ability to align longer tubes into large sheets of cloth in the dry phase means that doing useful things with the successively longer tubes of the future will be that much more straightforward.
August 20th, 2005 at 1:52 pm Using
I interviewed with a group in Lebanon this past week whose work is trying to get very long, straight CNTs. They have grown ones up to a few inches in length, but need to perfect the process. They then spin these into a fiber and test the tensile strength and other crazy shit that engineers do.
Of course, like a lot of science, there work is to be initially used for military body armor, but has a lot of cool potential applications
August 24th, 2005 at 7:38 pm Using
Speaking from way too much experience, dealing with NTs in solution (liquid form) really really sucks. Especially single-walled ones (SWNT), the ones used for electrical properties too. Anyway, the NTs in solution that I worked with were on the order of 0.1 microns, and they can make them longer (by a decent amount, centimeters+) but you’re still talking about something that resembles a mess of spaghetti more than a rope. bleh.
The dry-spun ones are awesome. they can be really long and assemble much more nicely, and you can more carefully control the ambient molecular adsorbtion (which affects electrical properties, not really the physical ones, but still). Making dry-spun sheets of the stuff allows for a macroscopically-significant strength, and as Tim said the “sky-hook” idea isn’t far-fetched at all. They’ve already made some 1000lb-test, micron-diameter “rope” for the marines that was rejected not b/c of material issues but instead b/c they couldn’t psychologically handle having their lives literally hanging by something smaller than a thread. (can’t find the link, sorry. and I made those numbers up, but they are representative.)