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Yarn Spun from Nanotubes
jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that Professor Alan H Windle has spun nanotube yarn by twisting nanotubes onto spinning rods as they come out of the furnace from which they are made. Professor Windle's team used ethanol (carbon source) with ferrocene (catalyst) and thiopene (for thread assembly) to create the structure. To create the tubes a mix of the above chemicals is inserted into a furnace in a jet of hydrogen gas. However, do not get your hopes up yet, the press release also indicates that the yarn has a strength comparable to that of most modern textiles but the groups does state that there is room for improvement. Yes, for those of you wondering, there is mention of a space elevator."
Not this time...
... one letter makes a big difference in chemistry
thiophene
IAAC - I am a chemist
The Nanotube Site
But it's not clear whether the method will ever produce fibres as strong as the individual nanotubes that comprise them: to do that, each nanotube would need to be as long as the entire fibre.
Nanotube is just another buzzword. Nothing special has been invented yet. The article says these are no stronger than regular textile fibers (like nylon, I assume).
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These guys are using nanotubes to create a quantum computer.
Making clothes out of this 'yarn' may not be such a good idea... wear it out to picture day and you may be going home burned and naked!
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Not sure but at this point in time the only people who have to worry are the ones making them in labs, and let me tell you the stuff used in most processes is a LOT more dangerous than casual exposure to asbestos. Benzene isolation was the fist method used to extract Buckminsterfullerenes for example, Benzene will kill you a lot faster than asbestos =)
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Eh, I doubt it. While tensile strength needs to be high in a ballistics vest, it also needs to be a little bit elastic. If not the shock just gets passed to the body full force.
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Hard to say what the insulating properties of nanotubes might be. Insulation in fabric has less to do with the fibers and more to do with the way that it traps a layer of static air next to you. OTOH, nanotubes don't carry heat well (if at all, I seem to recall that the tube radius is to small to carry phonons radially) across the fibers but along their length, they should be one of the most effective heat conductors in existence.
As for flammability, what you need to watch out for is the fact that they're optically unstable. Someone found out that if you try and takea flash picture of them, they spontaneously combust in a rather explosive manner.
I can see a nanotube sweater at a family get together right now:
"OK, everybody, say cheese!"
"NO WAIT, NOOOOO!"
FOOM!
Not true... the elasticity is mostly determined by the vests weaving. Kevlar does not stretch very much - its tensile elongation % is 2.8
Vests need to distribute the energy across the vest and elasticaity doesn't help there.
Unfortunately nanotubes appear to be much more toxic than graphite (at least particular kinds of nanotubes, and for inhalation), leading to lung damage of types unexpected by the scientists doing the research.
I recently read a popular summary somewhere but of course don't remember exactly where. There's a fairly technical (but not unreadable) summary at from Toxicological Sciences available online. (I think that's a freely available article.)
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Here's a link to the presentation by Jordin Kare you're thinking about: http://www.isr.us/spaceelevatorconference/pdf/Kare /Workshop2_kare.pdf.
One point he makes is that, to a large degree, propellent costs are irrelevant to the economics of lifting payloads to earth orbits. Space elevators satisfy a desire for technological elegance we all share, but they don't really seem so interesting when you examine their economics.
kevlar is a funny material.
it is a really strong fibre that can stop bullets when you make a vest out of it, but a knife will slide right through it and kill the wearer.
just because an item has a strong tensile strength doesn't mean it can't be cut.
Carbon nanotubes are just carbon. Carbon is not toxic.
Asbestos is not toxic either. Toxins work by chemical poisoning. Asbestos works its harm via mechanical damage on a microscopic scale.
Strength is usually expressed in terms of force per
cross sectional area. To say that the new yarn has
the same as the one implies "for the same thickness".
It's not that hard to cut nanotubes. I imagine a knife or sharp rock would do nicely on this stuff, seeing as nanotubes grown from ethanol are usually full of defects (yay oxygen).
Remember, they have high tensile strength, not a high shear strength. We cut nanotubes all the time in our lab, using a silicon atomic force microscope tip (think tiny, tiny silicon record player).
On the other hand, it would be a pain to be tied up in nanotubes. They might stretch a little, but good luck breaking it.
In the space elevator plans I've read, you don't "anchor" it. The elevator has a counter weight on the other end, so that the center of mass is at geosynchronous orbit. It isn't anchored; it's suspended in the air. They attach the bottom to some floating platform in the ocean so you can actually get on the elevator, but at that point the tension should be essentially zero.
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