Slashdot Mirror
Space Elevator Group to Open Nanotube Factory
FleaPlus writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Universe Today report that the LiftPort Group, a consortium dedicated to commercially developing and constructing a space elevator, will be opening a carbon nanotube manufacturing plant in June of this year. The new facility has been dubbed LiftPort Nanotech. Many expect the LiftPort Group to be a front-runner in NASA's recently-announced Centennial Challenges competitions for space elevator technologies, which begin in September of this year."
Naturally, this elevator's music will be composed entirely of Star Trek themes.
If you think you're a hardcore roleplayer, come prove it to us at ArmageddonMUD.
Nice going, pointing to a 2.7MB PDF file. For those of you who want more information about the space elevator concept, visit the Wikipedia page on space elevators.
Won't it be kinda boring? I mean, I always enjoyed going to a large skyscraper, pressing every button in the elevator from bottom to top, and then getting off at the very next floor, leaving any other poor bastards to wait as the elevators stops on every one of 84 floors. Not too many floors in space though. At least, not yet. I'm betting there'll be a McDonald's half way up by the time you or I get a ride.
Since when did we have the capability to
make fiber optic cables over a mile long?
We didn't at first, and yet we STILL built
plants to spin fiber optics cable.
It's the same situation here.
Hint: it's called a "lab" by some people.
It's a production plant, technically,
since the focus is also on the industrial
system engineering problems of mass
producing carbon tubes.
E.g., where do the raw inputs go? What
machines connect the hopper to the next stage?
Where the computers located? What sensors
are needed to monitor the reliable production
of lengths of tube wires? We can make one
or two in the lab, but what other equipment
do we need to make fuckloads (that's a
technical term) of tubes?
We can make short tubes, yes. We're learning
how to make long ones. If we suddenly learn
how to make arbitrary length cables over night,
we'll be DAMN sorry if we haven't worked out
the production logistics of a factory first.
What a silly point you've attempted to raise.
And +2 mod already... Oh my.
This is why you read slashdot, while real men
go off and build the technology of a new
century.
The recently opened NanoFactory has been reported lost. Scientists are combing the floor near their desk to find the misplaced factory.
From the faq http://www.liftport.com/faq.php
We don't need and are not counting on individual carbon nanotube molecules running the entire length of the space elevator or any significant fraction thereof. The individual fibers in a string or rope are only a few millimeters long, yet the rope has a large fraction of the theoretical strength of the fibers. This is even more the case with MOLECULES, several orders of magnitude smaller than a fiber. A diamond is said to be the "hardest substance in the world" because of the strength of the carbon bonds that make it up, but a diamond is not a single molecule. Likewise an SE could be made with CNTs just a few centimeters or millimeters long. (In fact, a CNT several centimeters long is a wonder; they're single molecules!)
Brought to you by the RTFA consortium.
IANAMA (I'm not a materials engineer) but to my best understanding carbon nanotubes come in single walled (SWNT) and multiwalled (MWNT) flavors.
The former are what you want for the elevator because they have extraordinary tensile strength and are very light (worthy of noting is that while their *theoretical* tensile strength is 5 times what you need for an elevator - 300GPa - and you need a safety factor of about 2 to actually make one - ~110GPa - the strongest single SWNT made to date is somewhere around 60GPa. I *think*.)
The latter - multiwalled - are much more dense and so will not be fit for an elevator - too heavy. These might actually be of use where strong rigid materials are required, such as construction. Just remember that we construct not out of what is strong but of what is cheap and readily available, hence some places use more wood and others use more concrete, and nobody uses steel except where local cheap materials don't cut it (lile.. skyscrapers).
Would be nice to have someone who has up-to-date info clear this up.
-
After submitting the article a few days ago, it's come to my attention that this isn't going to be the first nanotube factory; I didn't explicitly say anything of the sort in the submission, but wanted to clear any possible assumptions. From an industry report:
Among the small wonders produced by nanotechnology are carbon nanotubes, an advanced material as strong as diamond. These amazing carbon cylinders possess 100 times the tensile strength of steel and are 10,000 times finer than human hair. They are believed to conduct heat better than any other material, and they can also conduct electricity or function as semiconductors.
"Nanotubes are astonishingly promising, and I'm a realist, not an optimist," says Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor at Northwestern University. "It's a question of making the technology cheap enough." In 2001, only 3 kilograms of the highest quality carbon nanotubes--the single-walled variety--were produced worldwide, each gram worth $300, or 30 times as expensive as gold.
Now, full-scale production of carbon nanotubes is underway at the world's first ever large-scale nanotube factory, built outside Tokyo by the Carbon Nanotech Research Institute, a subsidiary of Japan's Mitsui & Co. The new facility is expected to churn out 10 tons of carbon nanotubes--albeit the lesser quality multi-walled type--a month, and CNRI anticipates the price will be a much more reasonable $80 a kilogram.
These multi-walled carbon nanotubes may not possess all the impressive properties of their single-walled brethren, but mixed with plastics, they make ultrastrong composites or microscale precision parts. Such carbon nanotube-filled plastics are already being used by automakers in fuel lines because they are conductive and can thus be grounded to release static electricity, which can ignite flammable gasoline.