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First Pure Nanotube Fibers Made
TheSync writes "Researchers at Rice have announced the discovery of how to create continuous fibers from single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT). The breakthrough was based on the ability to dissolve a large amount of SWNTs in sulfuric acid, up to 10% SWNTs in solution. At high concentrations, the SWNTs form tightly packed liquid crystals that can be processed into pure fibers. The Space Elevator can't be far away now..."
The Space Elevator can't be far away now...
Unfortunately, it needs to be on average 35,000 Km away to work.
-Sean
Well since I've just recently been told that the moon actually is moving away from the earth (see this thread) we really ought to leash the moon to the Earth to prevent this. I like the moon where it is. I suppose it could double as an elevator....
The Space Elevator can't be far away now..."
I think that's more than a little bit premature. Sure, it seems like we can make them a little easier now in the lab... but as an earlier poster mentioned, we're going to need some pretty long lengths to streach into orbit. Nowhere have I heard how exactly the little fibres that are grown in the lab will be joined together *at the usual nanotube strength* over and over again to make these long lengths.
Won't the 'joints' between individual fibres be a weak point in the system, and since we're joining thousands (if not millions) of little tube lengths in the lab, won't that have a rather large impact on the actual strength of the tube (vs if it was actually one long continuous length)?
Just because something is made of nanotubes doesn't make it strong, it depends on how they are laid out. The press release sounds good, but until they publish the measured strength/weight ratio of a few feet of their manufactured cable. (The data might be in the paper, but I haven't bought it. Anyone?)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Year: 2009
Place: Wal*Mart
Blotter: A bearded armed thug wearing a stylish black blouse was killed while trying to hi-jack the daily armored car. The purp was struck with a .357 caliber round which entered his chest and left his back.
Witnesses report that upon falling to the ground the woman's blouse was missing. Apparently, the robber thought the high tensile strength of Jaquline Smith's new line of clothes would protect him from any bullets. What he didn't consider was that the nylon stitches that held it together would tear and that the round would pull the entire blouse off his back, taking it in through the bullet hole and out a grapefruit sized hole in his back eventually ending up imbedded in the door of an Oldsmobile in the parking lot.
Police finding the round still wrapped in the pretty - if bloodsoaked, blouse, impounded it as evidence.
Eat at Joe's.
I don't know how many are interested and yet don't know about these pages but here is some good stuff for dreamers to read...
Institute for Advanced Concepts
and here is a design study for a space elevator:
Space Elevator Phase 1
Space Elevator Phase 2
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
The nanotubes are sticky and bond well with themselves. Read the article.
The process they describe here is a way of storing the nanotubes for transport, so that they can be assembled later.
Creating nanotubes is dead-on easy. I've actually seen a nanotube creation lab in the Physics department in the University of Washington. I think it is on the third or fourth floor. Go visit there if you get a chance.
After the nanotubes are created, they have to be seperated. They come in a hairball and need to be seperated individually. Next they are stored in a liquid type suspension. When they want to form their nanotube rope, they need a way to squeeze them back together again and extract all of the liquid. The liquid described in the article is beneficial because it helps organize the nanotubes so that they can be easily extracted. You will end up with 100% pure nanotube rope or cable at the end of the process.
Now you are probably speculating that it can't be that simple. It is. Sheep hair (wool), cotton fiber, polyester, and such all work in the same way.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Your arguments don't hold water mate.
Conventional rocketry will never be subject to the economy of scale. Too expensive. SE will.
Besides, supersonic passenger jets and Space Elevators are a bad comparison. In fact, you have it all upside down. You should be comparing the shuttle to the concorde, and the SE to the jumbo.
First off,
The tenth concorde is as expensive as the first.
The tenth SE costs a fraction of the first, because - you can use one elevator to raise another in almost no-time.
Then, and here's where you're off, A concorde has a slightly slower alternative that people find sufficient, and that costs significantly less. That's why there's 1200 747's and 12 concordes out there flying.
Next, you're assuming there will be the same amount of orbit-access demand when it costs 500$/kg or 100$/kg as there is now when it costs in the 5-digit/kg.
DEAD WRONG.
The cheaper the price, the more entities seeking space access as an option for their endeavor will open up their checkbooks. What you have is a completely untapped market of organizations - from poorer countries needing satellites, to research, low-grav-manufacturing of chips and medicine (offer a low-enough price and it'll be cheaper to make stuff up there than build centrifuges on earth), Communication satellite networks, power-beaming to remote and inaccessible areas that today require flying in fuel, satellites sent via SE will not need to be overengineered in a way that doubles their cost just to withstand liftoff shaking.
And it doesn't end there.
A SE is also a giant slingshot, making the entire solar system accessible without the need of large-scale LOX/Solid-fuel-rocket/ION/Nuke engines. All you have to do is go to the top and let go. A 91000km SE will slingshot you as far as Jupiter.
You'll get totally new markets - asteroid mining, settling the solar system (more real estate = more population = larger economies = more money to go around etc. etc. etc.).
The SE makes more financial sense than the computer or the automobile. It's a MASSIVE enabling technology that will make possible stuff you and I can't even imagine yet, the same as the people who harnessed electricity 100 years ago didn't exactly have The Internet or global cell phone networks in mind.
It's just a matter of who'll understand it first. NASA, Europe, China or India. Currently, I think China is in the lead.
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This is actually what we've been looking for.
A way to self-assemble nanotubes into ropes which can be used macroscopically. Whether or not it's strong enough to use in a space elevator remains to be seen, but we can actually talk about trying that now!
The nanotubes which were used here are electronics grade tubes, that means that most likely they were single or double walled (single walled being the strongest possible), and had a very low defect density. This is obviously important to the mechanical strength.
I work in a nanotechnology lab, and part of my job is to grow nanotubes. They naturally come in ropes which are around 1 to 10 nanometers in diameter and a few microns to a centimeter in length. The tubes are held together in solution due to van der Waals forces (basically friction) which are absurdly high for nanotubes. We've been separating tubes from eachother in solution from years, but efforts to re-align them have focused on the air-water interface. All they have done is found a solution which will solvate more tubes, to the point that the tubes have no room to run "against the grain" and so become aligned. This is done all the time with polymers. In retrospect it seems obvious and easy (it wasn't).
I remember a week ago Smalley was being bashed here about his conflicting views with Drexler on the future of nanotechnology and molecular assemblers (versus self-assembly). If you'll notice, Smalley is on this paper. This is why he has a Nobel prize, and why he disagrees with Drexler, self-assembled nanotechnology is already here, and it's only going to get better.