Slashdot Mirror
World Record: Four-Centimeter-Long Carbon Nanotube
colonist writes "University of California scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and chemists from Duke University have recently grown a four-centimeter-long, single-wall carbon nanotube (SWNT): a new world record. Previous SWNTs were a few millimeters long. Yuntian Zhu and his colleagues used a process called 'catalytic chemical vapor deposition' from ethanol (alcohol) vapor. From their abstract: 'Our results suggest the possibility of growing SWNTs continuously without any apparent length limitation.' Zhu: 'although this discovery is really only a beginning, the continued development of longer length carbon nanotubes could result in nearly endless applications. Actually, the potential uses for long carbon nanotubes are probably limited only by our imagination.'"
Out cheaply, but production speed is almost as important as strand length.
..
yeah. used to take them whole weeks to make a car, once upon a time. something about 'industrialization' changed all that, though
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Urk. I suck. Trying again.
:(
Google reckons 11 micrometres is 0.0011 cm.
Keeping everything in centimetres so I don't screw up again, it's 4/0.0011, or 3636 seconds, or about an hour.
So, my plan of having a nice fat satellite in orbit growing the stuff seems a bit scuppered still.
Geostationary orbital radius 38,785 km.
Growth rate 11x10^-6 m/s
elapsed time = 38,785,000 / 11x10^-6 = 3.526x10^12 s ~= 112,113 Years.
It going to be a long time till we have a swnt all the way at this rate.
PS yes I know that we don't have to have a single tube all the way there. We are going to have to ramp up the growth rate considerably though.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
In Science News, June 14, 2003, Baughman's team of Univ of Texas made a single-walled carbon nanotube fiber composite that's the width of a human hair, and 100 to 200 meters long. The nanotubes are spun with polyvinyl alcohol, and are 4 times tougher than spider silk (the previous record-holder) as well as stronger (can hold more weight).
100-200 meters, that's a length you can do useful stuff. One weird thing is, they weave it in with ordinary cloth to make supercapacitors in clothing (for built-in antenna,s tiny batteries, et cetera). The field is called 'electronic textiles'!
A.
One thing that concerns me with nanotechnology is that the creation of all kinds of weird molecules that nature has no time to adapt to may leave us with some remarkably odd (and possibly pervasive) toxicity problems.
What if CNT's get widely adopted into clothing, tupperware, etc, and then 30 years down the line we find that the little fibers that inevitably break off when you handle such material get lodged in the lungs and induce cancer (like asbestos and other kinds of fibers do)?
I've heard of all kinds of interesting possible applications of CNT's (super strong fabrics and cables, conductive fabrics, electro-kinetic fabrics (generates electricity for your ipod just from you moving around)). But is anyone looking seriously into governing and exploring toxicity issues with these new synthetic molecules and materials?
bif
wag more
bark less
Can we build it yet? huh? huh? Can we can we can we?
Can you tell I'm really excited by this?
Time to go enter a ribbon climbing robot contest!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I seem to recall that, some two years ago, an article (slashdot or not, I wasn't able to find it) quoted an engineer who was looking at the effects of individual nanotube lengths on the tensile strength of a nanotube composite.
The quote I'm remembering was that, if they could reliably build single-walled nanotubes at least an inch long and use that composite design, the tensile strength would be enough to build the elevator.
4 cm / 2.54 = orbit?
Pavlov's Dog ate the bell, and now he's barking at Schroedinger's cat all the time... -Me
Okay, so we can make them. Say that nanotubes become commonplace. Say that somebody discoveres they cause brain disease in fish and lung cancer.
How would we clean up the mess? Do they combust? Will they eventually oxidize to CO2? How do you destroy a carbon nanotube? Or will they just go through the food cycle causing damage for millenia?