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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."
Does it go to 11?
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
I've never done a spectroscopic analysis of ramen before - I usually just ate it
to spell out Chemical Vapor Deposition?
Overuse of acronyms degrade language, you know.
I cant see them becoming a girls best friend though
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Raman Spectroscopy
Dude, they're always tough until you boil them for 3 minutes. This is nothing new.
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This might be good for new machining tools?
I wonder what the optical properties are, and what the maximum size of these is?
OK great. Everytime diamonds/gems are mentioned in any way here on /. I get the familiar sound coming up from my computer room of "Honey, take a look at this. I bet NOBODY else at work would have one of these." Followed by a batting of the eyelashes and a subsequent emptying of my bank account. Please oh please stop mentioning these!!!
Oh well, there is usually at least a sexual favor in there somewhere as well. Here's to hoping!!!
Knightfall
Am I the only one who chuckled upon seeing the file name "wang_pnas.pdf"? TGIF
extra points for me... I just by my girl a Carbon Nanotube Engagement ring!
And thus, the student overtakes the master.
Ut Tensio, Sic Vis
they should run hardness tests on some of the stuff in the back of my fridge
Here on the planet Klepton, we've built our saucer hulls out of this stuff for decades. You Earth scientists are so retarded. Except for the one who invented Twinkies. He's cool.
CVD isn't an acronym, it's an initialism. Acronyms must be pronounceable as words. NATO, RAM...
Acronyms don't degrade the language, they enhance it. They become words. Initialisms degrade it.
On the other hand, it's definitional that overuse of acronyms degrades language.... that's the only meaning overuse could have for acronyms. The question is whether many people actually do overuse acronyms. I doubt it. It's mainly an initialism/acronym stew that causes trouble.
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!
...or maybe not.
Raman, the technology and dietary staple of millions of college students makes carbon nanotubes harder than diamonds, (but still not harder than the $.25 cent Raman noodles themselves)
Now we have drills to carve parts from synthetic diamonds. Very tiny drills, for very tiny machined parts. This nanotech is starting to get good.
--
make install -not war
I realize you are kidding... here is what Raman really is... (give or take a few details ;p)
Spectroscopy: study of quantities of light at various wavelengths (or frequencies). Useful because matter interacts with light, so by measuring light passing through unknown matter, you figure out what its passing through.
Raman spectroscopy, is a branch where one looks at the wavelength shift occurring as light passes through a sample. A bit like doppler radar involves a shift of frequency (although it's not a shift due to the movement of molecues, but rather due to energy differences in orbitals as they move/distort).
The cool thing about Raman is that you just need a single wavelength of excitation, meaning you can build a spectrometer with a single laser diode. Then you filter off the laser line, and presto, the only light left will be the spectrum of interest.
Caveats: low intensity, frequency shift is very small, you still need a monochromator. Advantages: you get information that isn't available in standard IR & UV-vis spectra, the spectra are excitation freuency independant (not entirely true), by taking advantage of resonances it's possible to get REALLY intense spectra (resonance Raman and SERS).
Drill bits made of carbon nanotubes would be an excellent application.
Just to remind that every small progress in the carbon nanotubes helpful for Space Elevator or Tether
thats funny. It reminds me of a my favorite martian episode where martin(he's from mars, get it?) needs to create a substance hard enough to fix his flying saucer. then, after this hilarity had ensued, he has to make a machine that can shape the substance.
ah simple times....
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am still waiting for synthetic diamonds to break De Beers' cartel.
Damn... Just when I get my +5 sword diamond bladed, they make a better diamond... or rather, carbon thingy
Only the purest of souls seek enlightenment. Everyone else just wants power.
Cool libertarian pipe dream!
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
The 2001 edition of the annual review of materials research, http://www.annualreviews.org/, has a nice review of the field of super hard materials. the authors point out that scratching a diamond is not, in intself, much evidence of anything; in the real world lots of soft scratch hard examples can be found. The authors of this article also point out that one of the few flaws of diamond is that it reacts with iron, so you can't diamond coat cutting tools; instead, you have to use much softer things like boron nitride or TiN. Nanotubes could have a major commercial future if they are harder then TiN, non reactive to iron, but softer then diamond.
full citation SYNTHESIS AND DESIGN OF SUPERHARD MATERIALS; J Haines, JM Léger, G Bocquillon
Annual Review of Materials Research, Vol. 31: 1-23
What's the current price of production of something like this - is it more efficent to use this where you'd use diamonds normally? PDF link wasn't working for me, so apologies if this was already mentioned.
Yeah, I've had to replace the diamonds in my wife's wedding ring 3 times in the past 5 years.
Damn band keeps turning her finger green too. Does gold oxidize too?
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The Hydrogen in water is already oxydized. The carbon in carbon nanotubes isn't.
How can this possibly be modded as informative? Refering to Superman as evidence and then posting a link that only talks about diamond finds around the great lakes does not convince me of the posters veracity.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I guee in his case it meant for certain definitons of oxidized.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Geez, now us guys have to buy our fiancees Carbon Nanotube Engagement rings?
Yeesh. No. There are just a few other problems, as with all ideas hatched by Scifi authors (who need to do little more than make something plausible on the most abstract level. Scifi authors almost always get it WRONG- we don't all use jetpacks and atomic cars to get to work, now do we? No 'death rays'- hell, we haven't even gotten speech recognition down, really).
I know some -other- fanboy will link to a FAQ that "answers"(says, for each issue, "we're aware of it and working on it!") each of these, but:
...all of these issues stacked against the relative ease of launching things into space (used to be a big deal. Now it's pretty ho-hum). Nevermind the main benefit everyone always cites (conveniently leaving out all costs except the actual energy needed to lift something- wow, a business like that with no overhead? Cool). Cutting the $/lb price by ten, is not going to mean 10x more stuff in space to put up. God, I hope not, it's cluttered as is...
Let the "flamebait" and "troll" mods who are Space Fanboys begin, for thou shalt not speak out against space development even if it IS a legitimate viewpoint- and one shared by many of us. Let's be a little more, uh, down to earth in our problem solving, please? We've got a lot of problems right here on earth, folks- and I'd much rather you all put that brainpower to them.
Please help metamoderate.
Your wife's ring probably doesn't get smashed between hunks of metal colliding at 1500m/s very often, as would happen with nanotube tipped projectiles.
Also, copper in your (<24 Karat, you cheapskate) wife's ring is what is making her finger green.
I think the abstract said "at least comparable to cubic diamond".
That would change Mohs hardness scale if it were harder.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
And best of all, no African peasants had to die to make these.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
...and enough with the nanotube ring jokes. That's not what I'm talking about.
You see, nowadays, when you want to facet a gemstone into the shapes most people have come to expect in jewelry, one has to use abrasives to put the faces in the stone. Usually Silicon Carbide grit (9.5 hardness, usually for softer stones) or diamond (10 hardness, for harder stuff) on a spinning disk to grind into the stone. But this doesn't work for all gemstones, notably diamond. Trying to facet a diamond with diamond grit on a lap (the disk) will just cut gouges into your lap. They are not cheap.
So diamonds still have to be done the hard way: roughly shaping the stone by cleaving, then using 2 diamonds, one of poor quality, to rub the faces into the good diamond. If this stuff can be synthesized in different grits (particle sizes) for fairly cheap, then it can be used to facet diamonds with machinery rather than by hand. Much of a diamonds (and most other stones) value is actually from the labor put into faceting it. This is especially so for smaller stones. How cheap? Well, currently lapidaries are paying for synthetic diamond grit...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
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.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Keep in mind the compressive strength of a material is not the same as the strenth in tension. Not only that material like this has pretty much no elastic properties. ie, thats why you can easily shatter a diamond even though it's so strong
Have you ever seen a ring made of 24K gold that's been worn for a while? Pure gold isn't much harder than lead and will get beaten up in a hurry. 14-18K is much better suited to everyday jewelry. Although it is a pretty crappy alloy that would turn fingers green.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
It looks like diamonds aren't forever.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
OOADL.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I'm expecting 2 more dupes of this article.
I see alot of people talking about uses of these nanotubes in a space elevator, but honestly, this can't be the only application. I was thinking another application could possibly be drill bits. If we can make these nanotubes more cost effective then actual industrial grade diamond we could use them as pieces of drill bits, I think :)
I am a student, so I don't know much about this, but surely there have to be applications for super strong materials etc.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
..."SWORDS!!!!" ?
Is it currently possible to calculate the hardness of a material knowing only its molecular structure? I'm guessing it is, but I don't know.
If so, do we already know what the hardest *possible* material would be? (Assuming regular atoms, not neutronium.)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Welcome our new inanimate carbon rod overlords!
If Chemical vapour deposition can be scaled up to construction size then buildings could be slowly built similarly to 3D printing. That'd be one hella strong building. If not whole buildings then perhaps just the windows. Short of that, maybe diamonds will be used as bullet proof glass.
..that I was listening to a radio show the other day, and this was the topic. Turns out that *most* (not all but most) of the high level opposition to "blood diamonds" comes from the debeers monopoly itself, they started it as a disinformation campaign, and have used a lot of mercenaries to instigate violence against a lot of poor people just trying to dig up a buck or two. turned them into rebels and terrorists and such like. Various folks ran with this disinformation and now it's carved in stone "fact". Reality is diamonds are more common than some other precious stones, they just keep a higher market value from the dearth of competition and a lot of industry collusion.
anyway, that's what was on the show....
hey! searching google to look for some data to backup what I just remembered anecdotally found me this gem!.
Won't be efficient considering the materials to be manipulated. The basic requirement of a material to be used in machining is that it be harder than the material to be cut. Materials that are easily friable, however, tend to be quite expensive to use. The only application this material would see would be grinding, and the rate at which it would degrade would be very costly. Carbides of some type are already in use that are extremely cost efficient and capable of cutting anything that would ever see use in production. This includes titanium, space-age ceramics, tungsten carbide, and even diamond with its friable nature.
This is just one of those nifty things that will be used in very specialized projects, but will be machined by other means. Further, the specialized projects this would be used for would most likely never see the use of a machine shop.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Perhaps I should have said significant? If I remember to get a half carat diamond faceted for cheap in the US, it's something like $150? Looks about right judging from this site.
You can get 1 carat certified G-white diamond round brilliant I1 for $430. It would cost $125 to get that faceted in the US. I'd say that's significant.
To get a stone faceted on a machine, it's about $45 to $90 per carat stone (depends on the stone's charactoristics and the cut complexity usually) in the US.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
you are right, tin, the element denoted by the symbol Sn from the latin stannum is soft TiN, Titanium Nitride is a very hard substance commonly used to coat tools; next time you are at the hardware store, if you look in teh drill bit section, u will c yellowish colored drill bits - the yellow is a layer of TiN BTW, TiN coating is millions, if not tens or hundreds of million a year
you get a pretty good idea of the basic meaning.
I mean Chemical Vapor Deposition.
Some compound, in vapor form, gets deposited on some surface. Sounds pretty simple.
Sure it don't make me no expert, but it gives me a heck of a lot more information than "CVD" does. (which sounds as much like a venereal disease as a fabrication method)
About a year ago there was a flurry of articles about how carbon nanotubes were highly toxic. There was even a thread in slashdot about it. Well, the stories keep coming about wonderful things that can be done with nanotubes but never a mention anymore about their toxicity. Why is that?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
> For humans, J. Storrs-Hall [...] proposed a space railway [...]
....
> 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
Well, you might have been human at one end of the ramp, but you definitely ceased being human leaving the other end
k2r (It's not easy being liquid)
Actually... for projectiles you generally want density rather than hardness. Hard and light will bounce right off, heavy will punch on through.
That and these things are *barely* any harder than diamonds. What 402 vs 407 GPa did they say? Not really enough difference to write home about unless there are other favorable properties... (Like avoiding the 4-way shear etc)
Ironic that Douglas Adams's solution to 'Life, the Universe, and Everything' would have something to do with diamonds, isn't it?
Oxidation applies to NORMAL carbon.
Nanotubes are CRYSTALS. Their molecular structure does NOT let them be oxidized. FYI, carbon nanotubes are graffite sheets rolled up. There's no open atoms that are chemically reactive.
And I'm speaking about NORMAL nanotubes, not this new flavor harder than diamond.
Uh, bonehead...
>> doesn't get smashed between hunks of metal colliding at 1500m/s very often
The last time I checked, most "weapon projectiles" only encounter such smashing, ONCE. After that point, it really doesn't f*ing matter.
And I still see no relevence to oxidation.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
You mean... arrgh! My blood! It's red because it's RUSTING! ... or something.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Run it up some really tall mountain. Old sci-fi idea.
Explanation is here, and here and more in google
I actually scanned down the responses to this one to see if anyone had yet made a 'raman' joke. Well done and funny!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Diamond has long held a special unattainable allure, not only because of its unparalleled hardness, Youngs modulus, dielectric properties and thermal conductivity (hold a big diamond in your hand and it will feel cold as it draws heat quickly - hence the moniker "ice"), but because of the possibility of making semiconductors from it.
IIRC, it has a really interesting wide band gap, but that two big practical problems exist:
If these barriers could be surmounted, diamond devices would become a more widespread and useful technology.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
We need a better scale of hardness anyway Our current one does not take into account true hardness. (Quartz is 7, dimond is 10, but dimond is around 4 times harder than quartz) Our current mesuring system was developed before we could determine actual hardness of minerals, rather than just comparing them to each other.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.