Slashdot Mirror
Diamond Nanotubes Created
raxxy writes to tell us that researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne Nation Laboratory have taken the next step in nano development. Combining the process for 'growing' diamonds and the latest in carbon nanotubes has given birth to a diamond-nanotube composite. From the article: "Diamond has its drawbacks, however. Diamond is a brittle material and is normally not electrically conducting. Nanotubes, on the other hand, are incredibly strong and are also great electrical conductors, but harnessing these attributes into real materials has proved elusive. By integrating these two novel forms of carbon together at the nanoscale a new material is produced that combines the material properties of both diamond and nanotubes."
Can this be used in the space elevator? Tensile pressure and all?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
everyone's tubes keep getting longer and harder all the time.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
With a diamond-nanotube composite ring.
I think the important question here is...how will this help us make better moon lasers?
This seems very similar to this article from just a few days ago, yet I don't think they're the same thing. I'd be interested in seeing a direct comparison of the nanorods and the diamond nanotubes.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Dude! Diamonds AND nanotubes!!! That's like, pirates AND ninjas!!!!!
Is this the coming of The Diamond Age? I can't wait for the diamond to lose it's monatary value.
Dinotubes.
Thank you, I'll be here all next week.
This is a nano diamond ring, you cant see it but will you marry me?
Everyone mark your calendar. This is the first day that history will show. The production of electric nano tubes will be the beginning of the brains for the robots that will come and take our pills when we're geriatrics!
not so elusive it would seem.
"Yes, ok so it's really useful, but does it look any good in earrings?"
"Diamond-Nanotube Composites Are Forever" just doesn't sound like a catchy slogan. Or Kanye West song, for that matter.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
You seem to have confused modern technology with science fiction. No more TV for you.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
I am intrigued by your notions of "modern technology" and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Congratulations. You can do vapor deposition of diamonds, and you can do vapor deposition of carbon nanotubes. So can everyone else. You can do them both at the same time? Interesting. Too bad you can't control the process beyond the ratio of nanotube to diamond.
What about average tube length? Alignment? Bonding with the diamond? Anything beyond what you'd get if you mixed extremely fine diamond powder and nanotube powder, mixed and compressed? Guess not.
However "Ultrananocrystalline(tm)" sure sounds cool. Maybe the innovation is in the buzzword.
IHABSCP (I have a B.S. Computational Physics)
Well if this is the same material that was reported about a week ago everywhere else (and probably /.) it's not strong enough for the space elevator (Aggregated diamond nanorods have a modulus of 491 gigapascals (GPa), compared with 442 GPa for conventional diamond.)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I happen to love how chemistry has been rebranded as nanotechnology. My favorite example is stain-resistant Dockers.
Maybe she'll settle for a tubular zirconia.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why is it that your own sig seems so contradictory to your message? Or is it the your way of acknowledging that you only are a karma whore, well aware that there is no sense in what you write?
Ok, seriously, who thought up the name "ultrananocrystalline" ?
This article is a bit confusing. First, of course, diamond is carbon. Solid carbon exists in two forms: diamond and graphite. The carbon bonds in the diamond structure are tetragonal (I think, been a while since chemistry), each carbon being bonded to four others. In the graphite structure, each carbon is bonded to three other co-planar carbons (trigonal planar?). I believe pi bonds form above and below the plane, adding some stability.
With the graphite form, all you can get is planes, tubes, or balls. Graphite is slippery because the intraplanar bonds are strong but the interplanar bonds are weak. The intraplanar grahpite bonds are stronger than the diamond bonds in fact, which is why nanotubes are so strong. With the diamond form, you can only get solid crystalline structures.
The headline is wrong (no surpirse). These are not "diamond nanotubes", but some sort of composite of (presumably) "ultranano" diamond particles and carbon nanotubes. The article doesn't go into much detail, and I don't care to delve any deeper at this point.
Think of any applications tagged with a "nano" word in its marketing right now as about as what a transistor radio was in the 1950s. It's good pieces of technology, it's technical advances, but it's not that revolutionary. We might not reach any really revolutionary stage during our lifetimes, but I would say it's far more likely that we actually manage to fullfil one or two of the farfetched dreams, and a lot of the more mundane ones.
There's an old Dilbert cartoon mocking this idea (no link b/c Scott Adams doesn't keep up older comics). Connecting the Earth and the Moon would eliminate the tides, destroying multiple animal habitats, killing Mt. Saint Michel's tourist business, and ending surfing as we know it.
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
Because it is people who persevere to turn their dreams into reality are the one who advance knowledge and civilisation, and that it's the people who say that things will never work or catch on are the ones who hold civilisation back.
People said that trains could never travel more than 30 miles because all the air would be pushed to the back of the carriage.
People said that airplanes could never travel faster than the speed of sound because the vibrations would pull the machine apart.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
(Off topic reply to myself...)
Speaking of "Ultranano", I think we need some sort of official ranking of these types of modifiers. Based on my experience in a retail store stocking hair gel, I've come up with the following heirarchy (as applied to hair gel hold strength):
Please make additions or corrections to this list. I think this should become an ISO standard or something.
Dude, you missed your time traveler convention.
The future wants you back.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
Science fiction? More like Science gibberish.
The font isn't set to Times New Roman anywhere. It lets your browser decide. Maybe you should stop complaining and figure out how to operate the perferences panel of your browser?
MP3's can it hold compared to this Diamond http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/rioaudio/default. asp?cat=35
Still no cure for cancer from nanotechnology is kind of saying "still no intelligent machines" about computers in the 1960s. And, yeah, we still have no intelligent machines in any relevant sense 40 years later
Given what it seems they would actually be used for, it's probably better that way.
Maybe I (for one) am just a little dismayed today, but even this development seems more suited to creating a better truncheon than anything else.
Linux is not Windows
Will these be controlled by an evil diamond nanotube cartel in order to drive up their prices 1000-fold? And then will they bribe their way out of an anti-trust case?
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
"I know the rotation of the Earth and the orbit of the Moon don't quite work like that, but with modern technology that could be solved..."
Modern technology can't even produce a toupee that doesn't get big laughs.
"Derp de derp."
Nonsense! With truely modern technology, we would just change the values of G, c and/or pi.
Thank fuck for that. Increase c to make travel go faster, increase G on Mars and the Moon for better gravity. I don't know how we could increase pi, are you sure that's possible?
Erm, eh, no actually, it wouldn't. Surfable waves (with rare exceptions like the pororoca), are created by the WIND. Tide only comes in to play insofar as the depth of the water changes, and thus changes the aspect of the way the (wind-generated) waves break.
Is it fascism yet?
Diamond nanotubes, or nanotube diamonds? Sort like pirate ghosts, or ghost pirates; or pirate ninjas vs. ninja pirates?
It's the same as any high risk high cost project, you just gotta find the right sucker, err, investor. Look at the launch loop. Could be done with today's technology (in fact, 20 year old technology) and needs no major breakthroughs.. so where is it? On the drawing board.
How we know is more important than what we know.
... in that they have achieved a combination (not with diamond but an alternative form of carbon) but don't really say what the properties are. Diamonds are brittle but hard. Carbon nanotubes exihibit high tensile strength. So the new material is a brittle, unscratchable sheet with high tensile strength? You might assume so, except that the article talks about "... use in low-friction, wear-resistant coatings, catalyst supports for fuel cells, high-voltage electronics, low-power, high-bandwidth radio frequency microelectromechanical/nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), thermionic energy generation, low-energy consumption flat panel displays and hydrogen storage." and "...interesting electronic and photonic transport properties". Either, someone is trying to generate some funding by using "nanotubes" and "diamonds" in the same article or this is one poorly written release.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
First Scientist: Hey! You got nanotubes in my diamonds! Second Scientist: Hey! You got diamonds in my nanotubes!
The space elevator is a fantasy (etc.)
Good thing you're so much smarter than all them fancy-pants scientists and engineers with their high-falutin' PhD's and book-learnin' working on that damn-fool idea! If they just listen to you, they'll stop wasting their time!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Why hell, I bet I could increase pi up to a couple of hundred if I felt like taking the time to do it right. Just go ahead and insert those diameters in the circumference and then pin them off and then just beat the living hell out of the remainder of whatever diameter is still hanging out there until it by god just goes on in. With a big enough beater, and enought time, and who knows, maybe a torch kit or something, I'm pretty sure I could work things out to get pi to most any old number you might want.
Is it fascism yet?
That makes me wonder...
Where do they get them fancy pants anyway?
Diamond is a brittle material and is normally not electrically conducting. Nanotubes, on the other hand, are incredibly strong and are also great electrical conductors... a new material is produced that combines the material properties of both diamond and nanotubes.
So we have brittle, less conductive nanotubes? I don't get the advantage here...
>Diamond has its drawbacks, however. Diamond is a
>brittle material and is normally not electrically
>conducting.
You know, for all that diamonds don't conduct electricity and such, women still go crazy for 'em.
Women!
They get 'em at them-there fancy schools when they get too big for their britches, of course!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So... is it like tieing a piece of bread with butter on it to the back of a cat?
We all know that bread with butter always falls with the butter face down and that the cat always falls on its paws, so one will cancel the other and the cat will be able to defy gravity, being suspended in mid-air?
Existing transmission lines are a huge waste of energy. They hold back conversion from fossile fuels to solar and wind by limiting the distance electricity can be effectively sent. Copper is too soft and heavy so aluminum transmission lines are built but there is too much resistance so transmission distance is cut back.
With nanotubes, near-superconducting transmission lines could be built which would enable cloudly areas to reap the benefits of solar electric power from deserts and wind power from the plains.
References:
http://smalley.rice.edu/ (see associated video lecture.)
"Diamond has its drawbacks, however. Diamond is a brittle material and is normally not electrically conducting. Nanotubes, on the other hand, are incredibly strong and are also great electrical conductors, but harnessing these attributes into real materials has proved elusive. "
Looks like they take two great technologies and put them together to get one mediocre result.
keyboard not found! press any key to continue...
No, the point is that normal diamonds are poor conductors but if you restructure them into nanotubes then they would be great conductors.
But since the Nanotubes are already great conductors with high tensile strength you would do this because...?
The original post had a humorous point, that the article summary lists only negative properties for diamonds and the declares wonder and happiness at getting nanotubes to take on these properties. While I'm sure the end result has some very nice properties it would have been pleasing to hear about them in the article summary too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ever heard of carbon-fiber composites? Strong and light but fairly brittle fibers embedded in a flexible, resilient, but low tensile strength epoxy matrix. And the combination is wicked cool stuff. The matrix balances the load between all the fibers nicely, and prevents any one fiber from bending to the shatter point. The fibers themselves make the composite incredibly strong for its weight.
Silicon carbide grains (hard, rigid) embedded in a block of aluminum (soft, flexible) is another composite with fantastic combined properties. Makes for nice structural members that need to survive a lot of abrasion.
So maybe we can now make diamond-coated nanotubes, giving us an insulated conductor (what a concept), that's super abrasion- and corrosion-resistant to boot. Or use nanotubes for their mechanical strength, but the integrated diamond improves the wear resistance of the cable you're using for lifts to orbit.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
People said that no-one could change the moon's orbit, or the earths rotation, as you're talking about a trillion trillion trillion tons of rock and inertia that would require more energy to budge than we could possibly hope to harness in the next thousand years.
And they were right.
Because it is people who persevere to turn their dreams into reality are the one who advance knowledge and civilisation, and that it's the people who say that things will never work or catch on are the ones who hold civilisation back.
Ye canna' change the laws o' physics, lad.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Not neccesarily.
I'm not siding with the grandparent's gloom & doom outlook on elevators, just pointing out that elevator-worthy material *might* reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude for conventional rocketry with some conceptual modifications -
chucking a rocket into orbit requires it to have two things -
a. Mass to dispose of (m1v1 + m2v2 = MV)
b. Energy, to be translated into the kinetic energy of the mass being disposed.
Now, let's give conventional launch the same available technology as the entity who is building an earth space elevator has - uberlight material and lasers.
Take something that looks like the shuttle. throw the engine out. Fill the external fuel tank with some other, MUCH LIGHTER stuff (e.g. the *mass*), remembering mass is *not* weight, that need the same characteristics as current propellant - e.g. doesn't explode.
Build the frame from your uberlight material.
Now put a ground laser on it, which will give the shuttle *energy*. enough to heat/accelerate your mass out the back end, and push you up.
I'm not implying this has or can be done, just that "rocket" propulsion *may* be able to drop, no idea how much, if given the same technologies you'd have lying around when you're contemplating starting to build a space elevator.
-
So this thing is brittle but very hard to produce ? ...in Soviet Russia !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The way I tell nanotech and chemistry apart is: if you make a new molecule by changing how its atoms are arranged it is nano tech, if you make a new molecule by combining different atoms I would call it chemistry.
However it is a very thin line, for example if you create a new material by combining different atoms, this first arrangement is chemistry. If you than choose to see if you can change the properties by moving around the atoms (by using chemistry) it is called nanotech.
But then, creating a DNA/RNA strand (which is a single molecule) and choosing which base pairs you want to be in it is also called nanotech then.
And maybe plastic manufacturing is also nanotech.
And the first arrangement of atoms in a molecule is also nanotech.
So I guess there is no real difference of nantotech en chemistry after all.
with modern technology that could be solved, either by altering the rotation of the Earth or the orbit of the Moon
I am intrigued by your notions of "modern technology" and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ah, you don't know ? there's a green and a red buttons that you just have to
press to get the moon closer or farther. 20 years ago, people in the X-OR movie were already able to invert the earth's rotation, so imagine what can be done with modern technology !
It's been a long time since that lecture on P and N dopings, but isn't the combination of a conducting and a non-conducting material useful in semiconductors? Something about Si not being a conductor until it's doped? Are there diode junctions in this stuff?
"The Internet is made of cats."
IANAMP (I am not a molecular physicist) but I have always wondered if it is possible to "dope" diamonds in a similar way that Silicon is "doped" to cause "holes"...
Silicon and Carbon are both quite similar in the kinds of chemistry that they form...
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
well, if you could change the curveature of spacetime, wouldn't that do it, along with changing the value of the sum of the angles of a triangle?
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Nanotubes made out of diamonds... now thats a good low cost solution.