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Electrically Conductive Plastic Polymer
AustinSlacker writes to mention Fox news is reporting that a Dutch researcher is announcing a breakthrough in plastics. A new way of rebuilding plastics could allow them to conduct electricity just as well as the silicon wafers currently used in electronic gadgets. "Prins discovered that in plastics, the movement of electric charges was mainly hindered by the shape of the polymer, the chain-like molecular structure [that is] the basis of each kind of plastic. Prins extended the work of a German group that had reshaped a polymer to form a ladder-like structures. By bombarding the specially developed plastic with electrons from a particle accelerator, she was able to study rapid electrical reactions and demonstrate the new plastic's ability to conduct electricity much better than regular plastic and as well as silicon chips."
The bad news is that future electronics will be even flimiser than they currently are...the good news is that they'll be more easily recycled...
Ceci n'est pas un post.
conductive plastic actually has some uses, but being a larger molecule than molecular silicon or germanium, doesn't make it look like the next New Chip Substrate.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This sounds very promising! I hope they can develop cheap manufacturing processes that will lower the cost of the products.
Also, wouldn't this plastic be recyclable? Cheap, Environment Friendly and probably more durable. Sounds like a win-win-win to me.
The real benefit is things renewed potential for things like sensors, and smart clothing.
Maybe it will make short but wide networks possible, who knows.
I think mostly though, that it could be used to replace the small electronic devices that get used everyday that you don't think of from a techies perspective. Automotive pieces certain types of switches, small controllers, toys, medical devices, spoilage detectors for food/ food processing etc. These would be the key industries I can think of off the bat
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Silicon is not a good conductor. The advantage it can be doped to make it as good of a conductor as necessary (which also allows you to make transistors out of it). I doubt this plastic can be doped...
Also, why not run a test current through it to measure the conductivity instead of using an accelerator?
I thought silicon was a half-assed conductor of electricity: hence, semi-conductor. Sometimes it do, sometimes it dont.
Can you dope this plastic and make, say, a plain ole NPN transistor we could use today? I know silicon is environmentally uncool.
Does it react to light the same way? Is this the breakthrough in solar panels we've been waiting for?
I want to know and I want to know now.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Ok, so in the last couple years or so we've seen the devlopment of: 1) electrically conductive plastics 2) transparent (when off) OLED-based displays, 3) transparent plastic-based circuits, 4) clear plastic-based batteries, 5) multitouch input capability, and 6) light-based data transfer methods and holographic data storage.
Within 10 years I hope to see all of these technologies combined into a geek fantasy device: a clear plastic tablet computer about the size of a pad of paper. Not to mention the hojillion other applications that suddenly become possible when you can embed a complete computer with I/O in a transparent medium: HUDs for glasses, store windows that are also dynamic advertising surfaces, image processing and data overlay on windshields (e.g. thermal or IR image data to augment the scene in poor visibility), etc.
I especially like the plastic battery concept since in theory you could make certain structural elements also function as you battery so there is no need for a bulky power source attached to the device, this would work well for the glasses display - the frames themselves could be the battery and/or processor. Although we'd definitely want to make sure there aren't any exploding battery incidents like with recent laptops.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Waging the good fight against dumbed-down science and research by press release, your masked hero finds.. this.
Mobile phones can soon survive being dropped
Good because you cannot get a patent after publication? Or bad because.. oh phooey. This might be by the same person.
* In unrelated news is anyone going to be at ETC2007? Neal Stephenson talk and a new hires cave called C6 by Iowa State! Someone video the thing!
That's neat! How long until we can print circuits with something like an ink-jet?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Absolutely INCREDIBLE!
Think of the possibilities man:
The statement about the conducting ability of this plastic was less than exciting: "By bombarding the specially developed plastic with electrons from a particle accelerator, she was able to study rapid electrical reactions and demonstrate the new plastic's ability to conduct electricity much better than regular plastic and as well as silicon chips."
My favorite method of detecting electrical conduction is to use an ohmmeter. The researcher seems to have demonstrated the ability of this material to conduct under certain conditions. The researcher has not demonstrated the ability of the bulk material to conduct electricity. I'll believe it when I see it.
BTW, pure silicon is an insulator. Doped silicon conducts depending on how much it is doped. Comparing the conduction to the conduction of silicon chips is kind of useless. It could be anywhere between infinite and zero.
If this type of plastic can be a conductive substance similar to silicon and costs less to produce, then this could be a huge advantage to those advocating the use of solar power. Currently one of the largest costs in creating solar cells is the high price for silicon which is used in them. The use of a cheap plastic polymer with properties similar to silicon might make solar cells much more reasonable to purchase for a lot of people.
Has anyone told Packard Bell yet?
Some settling may occur during posting.
Plastic Polymer? My! What next?!?
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
If you had a choice between using a particle accelerator or a power supply, which would you use?
I hope to convince my office to move to the grounds of fermi lab, so I can have the choice as well.
Just have to remember to switch to conventional power supply before they start the experiments with anti matter.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.
http://www.docinthemachine.com/ reported in January on the development of a product called Electriplast that is a resin based electrically conductive plastic- and that is commercially available. I believe it has potential in the medical device market as well as consumer electronics. You can read more about the product at : http://docinthemachine.com/2007/01/08/electriplast /
"Electriplast is a highly conductive recipe that can be molded into virtually any shape or dimension associated with the range of plastics, rubbers and polymers. CES chose this technology with a 2007 Innovation honoree for enabling technologies. Now it's just a matter of convincing manufacturers to look at the small medical tool market and not focus on its current #1 use- next generation cell-phone antenna."
If it is only partially conductive, the ESD (Electro-Static Discharge) properties would get my attention (safe discharge paths for cheap). And if it could shield the circuits from emissions and susceptibility, it would be a winner in my book.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Wouldn't this alone melt the plastic if you used it for any hevay duty amperage? What is the limit for the current before it starts a total meltdown?
I don't think we had enough uses for oil yet.
Insert snide male chauvinist remarks here. For extra points mention plastic and conductivity.- 683e-4db7-9675-c5c57399329c&la
By the way, she's not bad looking at all, picture (and phone number!) here: http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=40a4cfdf
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
This could be a big boon to battery technology. Plastic is way lighter than lead, cheaper and less toxic than Lithium or Ni-Cad. and maybe more corrosion resistant.
News flash: silicon isn't a conductor -- it's a semiconductor. Conductive polymers already exist. This is comparable to announcing that the latest Camaro is faster than a Model T, or that a new digital computing device can perform a million floating-point operations per second.
So I get the sensation that just like everywhere else on Slashdot, a lot of people are out of their depth when it comes to this topic. For some background, might I suggest reading about the work of the three men who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for their work in conductive polymers. These materials are incredible in a myriad of ways, but require a nontrivial understanding of materials to really get it.
Electrically conductive polymer leads to muscle-type plastic strads, which OBVIOUSLY in turn leads to the development of Battlemechs. So, when can I place my order for a Jenner, or maybe a nice big Battlemaster?
by measuring the microwave absorption ... This avoided the need to use electrodes. Such electrodes often disrupt the measurement.
According to This article they avoided standard meters to gain better measurements.
STFU. I'm SOOOO sick of hearing this!
They haven't actually produced any bulk material. Given bulk (solid) material, the standard method is to physically hook a current source to it and measure the voltage. You only worry about electrodes if you have so little material that connecting the electrodes creates a problem.
Of course with liquid materials, you do have to worry about your electrodes taking part in electrolytic reactions but we are talking about something that would have to be solid to be useful aren't we.
... why not run a test current through it to measure the conductivity instead of using an accelerator?
She did.
But hooking up molecule-sized test prods to an ohmmeter was a pain.
So she used a particle accelerator to inject the electrons. (TFA doesn't say what else she used to measure the current.)
I've contemplated using scanning electron beams for electrical measurements. Say: a low-energy electron beam for the negative supply, a high-energy one (creating more secondary electrons than injected electrons) for the positive, and a third one at an energy that turns it back around near the surface (or gets sucked in, depending on voltage) for a voltage probe.
But that's both too large and too energetic for testing single molecules of plastic.
Going the other way and using a particle accelerator to excite some observable side-effect of conduction is quite the hack. (I'd propose giving her an award but her university already did. Waytago!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I can see the headlines now "Conductive Plastic Accidentally Used On Electrical Tools", hilarity ensues. On another note this could a be a huge boom for lots of industries. Too bad we will probably all be dead and gone by the time it is actually useful.
WTF?
Does that mean chips are going to get just as shabby as everything else we've invented in glass, and turned into cheapo plastic versions?
--
make install -not war
This means that a bulk of this material will conduct a lot worse than silicon (propably in the order of other conducting polymers). Infact what they have meassured is the absolute maximum conductance which will only occure if you somehow get all the chains to line up in the final substrate. And well infact even then you won't get that good conductance since the polymer chains are finit in length.
I'm sure this is a very interesting material and an important scientific step in characterizing it, it's just not as big news as the headline make it.
we already have tunnelling effects in present transistors in ICs, and this is being exploited. you get a long plastic molecule doped up for semiconduction, assuming the material is suitable for it, assuming the regions don't migrate under the ion bombardment, and it's bound to be leaky as a soaker hose in the garden.
not ideal for controlling electron flow.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
from conductive plastic, and NASA had it for whatever on earth for in the 60s.
merely conductive plastic is easy to do, dump a bunch of carbon into the vat. somebody probably came up with it in the lab in the 30s or 40s, took it panting to their supervisor, who promptly said, "so what the hell can I do with conductive.... plastic insulation? Perkins, you need to take Friday off."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A new Slashdot record?
Is this old news, or is it just a new productization of old news?
e ates/2000/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laur
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
How long until saying you are "building your own computer" actually means constructing one out of lego blocks?
Sorry, no snide remarks here.
Why is it such a big deal that it's a girl? The only exceptional (and sorry) thing is that there aren't more of them. I've worked with mixed teams, and once you get the team past the mainly male side effects (takes a while) such teams work exceptionally well - not in the least because of the different perspectives.
Insert
I also can see this technology being used in chipset/semiconductors - not on the ground, but for things like the space shuttle, ISS, etc. Reason being is that if unlike current semiconductors which would fairly easilly get fried by radiation, etc, this could help replace the old chipsets on the shuttle with newer, more efficient stuff...
Computing with Bubbles: Video 1: http://rvincoletto.multiply.com/video/item/104/ and video 2: http://rvincoletto.multiply.com/video/item/103/
I worked on conductive polymers in grad school 14 years ago. I haven't seen any great advances in the science or applications of the technology since then, even considering this research. Just one more small advance. The only slower developing technology seems to be optical computers or nuclear fusion.
It seems that the first response to the parent (which claims that PCBs are made of silicon) has cost this post some points. You know that /. isn't what it once was when people don't know the difference between a chip and a PCB ... Sad day.
Rome wasn't bilked in a day.
...that you'd see in the Civilization 4 technology tree or from Galactic Civilizations 2?
This stuff matters - I'd like to imagine there's some uber controller directing researching funds for our civilization... and after plastics, the Apollo Program!!! Go Team Human!!!
Given the source, I'm skeptical about the accuracy of this article.
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