Slashdot Mirror
New Technique for Creating Nanotube Sheets
Quetzalcoatl writes "A team of researchers has come up with a way to make strong, stable sheets of multiwall nanotubes at a rate of seven meters per minute. These sheets already display a number of remarkable qualities that lend them to many different applications, including artificial muscles, transparent antennas, video displays and solar cells."
Dupe.
No Flash Photography of the nanotubes please.
They will explode.Two Roommates and a Boyfriend, updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
Remember: the number of roots of a polynomial is equal to its order.
Now our soldiers can have shortages of nanotube underwear - yay! Nanotube condoms anybody?
"The server's on fire!
It's more than I can handle"
Jeez...there's what.. (looks at file size) a 6.7MB video of this?
And it's a dupe!
Bravo! I genuflect in the direction of Slashdot, honoring its unlimited power to bring fear and loathing into the hearts of system administrators everywhere!
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BMO ++ ATH0 NO CARRIER
I don't care. My Karma Is Bigger Than Yours
Time to put tags on stories and search that in addition to links (there have been numerous dupes with same links). If the tags are on, then pull up all the past stories starting with the most recent. This is not a hard thing to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
With one of these babys it would only take 26245.00978 years to have at least part of your 60,000mi. space elevator! Consider it a long-term investment? Where do I signup!?
46 hours and 34 minutes, surely this has got to be getting close to a duping record
when they have it in 2 ply, 1000 sheet rolls that fit on my toilet paper spool, then maybe i'll be interested.
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
Blackmailing sysadmin with threat of slashdotting - $10,000
Posting the article twice after he pays up - Priceless
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
It's amazing what science is doing nowadays. First we're applauding the efforts of one group's efforts to create a new technique to make nanotube sheets, and only a few days later a NEW technique comes by! Fantastic!
Good-Tutorials
"Instead of whining about it being a dupe. Just don't read the article. What a concept"
But you don't know it's a dupe until you RTFA, and by then it's far too late. It's like when Laurie Anderson says about what you do in the morning when you eat your cereal, and you're just staring at the box reading...reading and eating, and then you discover that what you've been eating what you're reading.
And then it really _is_ too late.
Here's a concept: stop wasting my time with your concepts.
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BMO
I appreciate your effort to oust CmdrTaco as the #1 dupe poster, but this simple first-step is but a small part of a journey. CmdrTaco has done this for far longer than you.
He has also duped himself more than once, something you'll have to master before dethroning him.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The problem with the foam is that Nasa loves to leave the shuttle outside for days with an unstable foam (suspectable from sun hardening/creating cracks, soaking up moisture from the atmosphere which then freezes, widening the cracks). The temperature difference between outside and inside of the foam can reach about 100Kelvin. If they would shield it from the sun, do not drive it out to early and keep it nicely aircoed and conditioned, the foam will probably stay better. If really good aircoed, or with more accurate launch windows, the foam might not bee needed at all.
Adding a protective net around the just described properties of the foam, will makes you run the risk that the foam will really behave bad. The foam could instead of fail in pieces fail as a whole, causing this ultra strong net to fly around in un unpredictable way.
Adding the net not around the foam but instead around the shuttle will take care that shuttle arrives in one piece in space. The material however is not heat proof. It will fail under high temperature, actually the outside of the space shuttle is a "controlled" failure, in which after several flights certain parts are replaced. If your net fails on the way back, the shuttle can still loose the vital tiles and not land in one part.
Your idea is not a bad one, and does not need a superhightech foam perse. Just a flexible PE layer could do the trick. The tank will never gets really hot (it is dumped before that happens, and then burns itself on the way down, nobody cares about that part of the trip). Maybe adding a second wiring in the foam itself with some fiber will help too, it will be more complex though.
Last but not least: this problem is a problem invented by Nasa. The foam would not or be less necessary if Nasa used a different fuel (kerosine like the Russians), or would keep the shuttle in a lower surrounding temperature condition.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
And next dupe about that will come from piquepille. I can see that already:
"Are you amazed at how nanotubes _are_ produced? See _brief_ article for more details".
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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"2000 posts pointing out how this is a dupe. :/"
Amusingly, nobody checks to see if a comment on it being a dupe already exists before they rush to the reply button.
"Derp de derp."
Slashdot invents new way to duplicate nanotubes!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Show me a man who can joke about small penises and link to his wife's blog in the same post and I'll show you a man who knows no fear.
Blank until
... monofilament "splendid cheese cutter"[1].
And please refrain from modding me Funny. I am in fact serious: All this nano-research is fine and dandy, but it really doesn't _do_ much for us until actual products emerges on the consumer market. "us" being you and me, as opposed to science and nano-technology research(ers).
In all sincerety, it would be great to see infinitely sharp and durable cheese cutters, or full-body workclothes that are strong and light, or, for that matter, that fabled space elevator. We are, after all, living in the (also-fabled) 21st century.
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[1] Arthur C. Clarke, "Foundations of Paradise" p.53 (ISBN 0446677949)
"Good news, everyone!"
PBS Nova is offering online playback of a really neat series called Science Now.
The second episode included a neat profie of researcher Naomi Halas who studies nanoshells -- spheres rather than tubes. One potential appication is as a treatment for cancer.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I saw this and it made me reminisce about Bill Joy's essay http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
"Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." This is the kind of tech that makes me think the future might not only not need us but might want to tidily get us out of the way while it's at it.
This is cool stuff but every instance of this stuff should be registered like a lethal weapon and accounted for and contained in class-4 biocontainment before we figure out how we can learn how to safely get rid of this stuff after we are done with it.
In the article, they concerned themselves with the problems of degraded nano particulate floating around and causing problems. Sure, nano dust could cause people to have more asthma or worse, but on the macro scale the potential for problems are apparant too...
One of the things that concerns me is huge almost invisible ribbons or sails of this stuff floating around in our oceans or in our atmosphere trapping and killing fish, whales, birds, and 747's.
Have you walked along the coast of an ocean beach lately? You cannot walk for 2 meters near the high tide line on just about any beech (u.s. mainland) without finding near-indistructable plastic fishing nets or some other human waste. We make our bed we sleep in it.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Is the softball-sized device in the video really the entire manufacturing "factory"? What's the feedstock, and how is power supplied?
Imagine a gang of ribbon robots (ribbots?) in Solar orbit, each with a tank of feedstock. They roll their ribbons out from a central equipment cluster towards a circumference 10Km away. The whole rig is spinning, the "centrifugal force" keeping the ribbons straight towards the circular rim. Pairs of magnetically linked ribbots literally weave ribbons around the ribbon spokes, just like spiders weaving their webs, welding paths around the center to the spokes. Now there's a 300Km^2 circle, weighing 10tons collecting 4TW of uninterrupted solar energy.
Even if this film is only a little better at photoelectrics than current PVs, that's over 1TW, the entire US electrical consumption. Put two up there, mount a soviet-style maser array (98% efficiency) pointed at a relay platform floating out in the Pacific. We can recycle all our power plants, coal mines, and petroleum "allies" into national parks or shopping malls (I know which one I'd convert the nuke plants to).
If we float the "PowerWeb" in Solar orbit closer to the Sun, we don't even need as large an area: halfway to the Sun gets 4x the power, over 5KW:m^2. OTOH, since the material is so strong, light (and maybe cheap), we can make them really big, without worrying too much about shear and ripple forces tearing the web. If we put a couple dozen of them floating around the Solar System, maybe in some concentric rings vertical to the ecliptic, we could install a power grid for exploration and colonization of our entire Solar System. A "light rail" capturing Solar energy, and beaming it against a fleet of solar sails, shuttling crews and cargo around. All at the speed of the original Age of Sail, except a few weeks could get us around from Earth thru Neptune - mere days for unmanned craft at >1G.
And this is just the first generation of the tech. Both the material and the factory will get smaller, lighter, cheaper, better. I just hope the American vision of scientific exploration proves worthy of the promise of this stuff. Because I'd hate to switch paying my power bills from Saudi Oil to Chinese Electric.
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make install -not war
You guys just love jumping to conclusions, don't ya? I bet even after I post this, there will still be comments about "duping" to follow. You see, off the bat ya gotta realize that this article says multiwalled nanotubes -- usually it's just "carbon nanotube sheets", giving the idea it's two-sided like a sheet of aluminum foil. Moreover, it doesn't say they created the strongest nanotubes, but rather a new and faster way of developing them.
You're right, there the same, kelvin just measures from abs zero as opposed to the freezing point of water. They're both based on the gradient of water from freezing to boiling at 1 bar.
These sheets have about 14T nanotubes per m^2, or lines of 4M tubes per meter - thats a 250nm "process" of nanotubes. If each tube can be made a pixel (maybe tagging it with an organic group, for OLED), that's 100K dpi. And likely not on a perfect rectangular "grid" like today's 25dpi LCD monitors, but rather in an "organic" texture like the surfaces of actual objects we see. 10Gpixels per square inch - where are my VR contact lenses?
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make install -not war
Maybe a premature announcement to get additional funding for a project that's still decades away from seeing results, I dunno... but something about this just screams "cold fusion" to me, and I don't think we'll ever see it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Even if this film is only a little better at photoelectrics than current PVs, that's over 1TW, the entire US electrical consumption. Put two up there, mount a soviet-style maser array (98% efficiency) pointed at a relay platform floating out in the Pacific.
... or Beijing ... or wherever ....
I admire your vision. But I'm afraid that orbital maser arrays will more likely be pointed at Riyadh
-kgj
-kgj
Score 5? Oh, give me a break!
:P
The problem with the foam is that Nasa loves to leave the shuttle outside for days with an unstable foam (suspectable from sun hardening/creating cracks, soaking up moisture from the atmosphere which then freezes, widening the cracks).
There have been no studies that indicate that the few days that the main tank spends outside the vehicle assembly building have any effect at all on the foam's stability. Quite to the contrary, the evidence suggests that it's the method of application - especially hand-application - that determines its stability.
The temperature difference between outside and inside of the foam can reach about 100Kelvin.
Only after it has been fuelled. Also, it depends where on the surface you're talking about - the difference between inside the LH tank and outside can be as much as 300K, but the temperatures on the skin vary incredibly widely.
If they would shield it from the sun
You want them to build a *Second* VAB? Do you want the shuttle to blow it to shreds, or do you want this *second* VAB to be more complex than the first, and retract in its entirity? Seriously, I thought slashdotters thought the program spent too much money being overcautious where it didn't matter already.
do not drive it out to early
They drive it out as physically late as possible - not for some mythical sun-foam problem, but because of the risk of storm and wind damage. Launching a 2,040,000 kg craft safely takes days on the pad. It takes hours just to fill up the tanks. The crawler takes 5-6 hours simply to get to its destination 4 miles away. Etc.
and keep it nicely aircoed and conditioned,
Ah, there you go! That'll be an economical choice for a nonexistant problem - a retractable, insulated air conditioning building on top of the pad.
If really good aircoed, or with more accurate launch windows, the foam might not bee needed at all.
False. You would need *zero* percent humidity as well. And a redesign at that - the foam insulates against heat as well. It's not a realistic proposal, as you'll notice that it hasn't been done anywhere in the world.
The tank will never gets really hot (it is dumped before that happens, and then burns itself on the way down, nobody cares about that part of the trip)
Do you know why the ET is orange? It's not because they think it's a pretty color. The SOFI (Spray On Foam Insulation) used on the shuttle is a variety of materials known as SLAs (pronounced "slaw") - SuperLight Ablator; orange is its natural color. I assume that you know what an ablator is. They use an ablator precisely because there is so much heat during the trip - don't tell me that you thought that something with such a huge cross section, moving at high speeds, and with irregular protuberances and with close proximity to engines wasn't going to get highly heated
Last but not least: this problem is a problem invented by Nasa. The foam would not or be less necessary if Nasa used a different fuel (kerosine like the Russians)
False. First off, the Russians have worked with LOX/LH a good bit, mainly on upper stages - when not solid, kerosene stages are almost always lower stages (with a few exceptions). Want examples of stages/craft either developed or studied? Angara KVRB, Energia core, Energia EUS, Energia M, Interim Hotol, N1 Block R, N1 Block S, N1 Block SR, N1 Block VII, N1 Block V-III, Proton KM-4, UR-700M-3, Vulkan-1, Vulkan Blok V.
Heck, even the Kliper is considering a LOX/LH2 upper stage - such a stage was proposed back in 1962 (Molniya 8K78L) for Soyuz. It'll need one to get the sort of performance numbers they're claming. The bottom stages will remain kerosene.
Secondly, the ET and SSMEs are not the equivalent of the Russian (lower) kerosene stages - the SRBs are the equivalent of the kerosene stages (near Earth thrust to lift and accelerate the craft). The main tank fu
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.