Carbon Nanotubes Harder Than Diamond

purduephotog writes "CDAC has announced the formation of a new form of hexagonal packed carbon similiar to diamond. Carbon nanotubes are compressed at 75 GPa and quenched. The new material is conclusively different via Raman Spectroscopy and both cracked and indented the diamond anvil used in its creation. CDAC is also known to have created via CVD the hardest diamond to date."

Comments

Possible uses?

[francisew]

This might be good for new machining tools?

I wonder what the optical properties are, and what the maximum size of these is?

Re: Possible uses?

[Izago909]

It cost me $15 for a pack of replacement razor blades. It cost me $30 to have them cryogenically treated. I've been using my current set for about 2 months now. The other ones got about 3-4 months of use before I threw them out. At this rate I've got about a 2 year supply left. There's a reason razor companies use the softest steel possible and charge between $5-8 dollars for a pack of 4 blades. It's also the same reason it can often be cheaper to buy a new printer instead of replacement cartridges.

Cryogenic treating is nothing new. Top automotive racers have been freezing engine parts for over a decade now. Aeronautical companies have been doing it for longer. Did you just spend a lot of money on a special silk piece of clothing for your girl? Have it treated too. You'd be surprised how long silk will last, or how much stronger it will be after treatment. Tired of sharpening lawn mower blades? Did you buy your kid some expensive plastic toy you know he/she will destroy within a week? Damn near everything can be treated. Metals, fibers, and plastics (and other polymer compounds) are incredibly resilient afterwards.

Space Elevator, here we come!

[ave19]

These are the types of advances we need to make the space elevator a reality. Either using nanotubes like this in a matrix, or more mind-boggingly, create wires of them.

Going up!

cheap space launches

[WillWare]

One person commented that this may help advance the Space Elevator, and that may be true, but it's an even bigger help for the space railway because the material is good under compression (the SE needs something good under tension). The space elevator subjects its payload to about a week of heavy radiation, so it's not practical for passengers. There are still lots of non-alive things we want to put in space cheaply, and for those it's great.

For humans, J. Storrs-Hall (of sci.nanotech fame) proposed a space railway that could be built sooner and more cheaply than a space elevator. It's a linear induction motor laid along a 300km-long track, 100km above the ground, where the atmosphere is thin enough to take a few orbits to decay your orbit. You drive your spaceship up a ramp to one end, and the motor accelerates you along the railway at about 10G for about 90 seconds, putting you in a slightly elliptical orbit with an apogee on the other side of the Earth. When you hit apogee, you do a burn to get into a higher orbit.

Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.

The structure is a collection of A-frames, built like a radio tower. Like the space elevator, only a tiny fraction of the height is subjected to significant weather. The structure is under compression, not tension, which widens the choice of materials. According to Storrs-Hall, existing synthetic diamond would be suitable.