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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.
With a diamond-nanotube composite ring.
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!!!!!
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?
not so elusive it would seem.
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
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.
I can't wait for the diamond to lose it's monatary value.
Actually, the best way for diamomd to lose its value is to convince enough people there is no significant difference between a manufactured and a natural diamond. The value of a natural diamond is based on how few flaws there are (fewer->more value). Yet, the odd thing is, how you tell a manufactured diamond from a natural one is the manufactured ones often don't have flaws.
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.
(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.
err, no it's not. the refractive index is how you tell real diamonds from manufactured ones.
ôó
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.
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?
>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!
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?
Manufactured diamonds are real diamonds, so they have the same refractive index, and density, as natural diamonds. The more usual term for them is synthetic diamonds, and they can be distinguished by their trace elements and by the nature of inclusions (flaws). For instance, high pressure synthetic diamonds have iron inclusions that are not found in natural diamonds.
It is an open question whether the new vapor deposition diamonds will continue to be identified, though for now they can.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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...
So this thing is brittle but very hard to produce ? ...in Soviet Russia !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.