The World's Longest Carbon Nanotube

Roland Piquepaille writes "As you probably know, carbon nanotubes have very interesting mechanical, electrical and optical properties. The problem, currently, is that they're too small (relatively speaking) to be of much use. Now, researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have developed a process to build extremely long aligned carbon nanotube arrays. They've been able to produce 18-mm-long carbon nanotubes which might be spun into nanofibers. Such electrically conductive fibers could one day replace copper wires. The researchers say their nanofibers could be used for applications such as nanomedicine, aerospace and electronics."

Comments

Wow

[jswigart]

So perhaps the internet will indeed become a series of tubes?

Re:Wow

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Maybe. Maybe in an odd twist, the Internet might actually become a large fleet of nano-trucks.

Re:Wow

[ScrewMaster]

That's a scary thought ... Ted Stevens actually being prophetic, rather than just wrong.

Re:Wow

[Reality Master 101]

Ted Stevens actually being prophetic, rather than just wrong.

You know, Stevens gets a totally bad rap on that whole thing. Exactly what is wrong with that analogy? Even UNIX uses the analogy with pipes; Ritchie* could have just easily called them tubes rather than pipes. And yes, the "tubes" of the Internet CAN get clogged up if there's too much flowing through them.

I've never understood why he took such a beating about it. I guess some people are just determined to believe the worst about people, as though the guy though the Internet was literally air-filled tubes.

Re:Wow

[espressojim]

Maybe this is why? Even if the metaphor isn't horrible, the delivery was:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

From wikipedia.

One nanotube: two birds

[ian_mackereth]

So, not only will we get light, cheap, immensely strong conductors, we'll also have a good market-driven reason to get all that valuable carbon out of the atmosphere!

Voila! No more global warming!

8-)}

ZOMG BOYKOTT R0L4ND!1!

[pestie]

Did I get it right in the subject line? Apparently all Slashdotters are supposed to hate this Roland guy, right? God, I just want so desperately to be loved...

Re:Come again

[ian_mackereth]

Just to get some perspective on this, 18mm is about a third of the length of good quality wool fibres.

That puts it in the area of useable length for macro-sized application.

Re:One more step toward a space elevator?

[camperdave]

Might we not make single-stage-to-orbit vehicles which so drastically reduce the price of launch costs that building a space elevator is not only possible, but unnecessary?

The problem with rockets has never been the mass of the rocket, but the mass of the fuel. There's only so much oomph you can get out of a million litres of hydrogen and oxygen chemically, and it's only marginally more than the power it takes to lift a million litres off the surface and into space. Sure, a lighter fuel tank, and lighter payload will help, but not significantly.

No, if we want cheap access to space, we either go nuclear, or build some sort of space elevator. While we may just be at the threshold of being able to make materials with the tensile strength needed for a beanstalk, we have the tech to make gas core nuclear rockets right now.

some perspective

[Goldsmith]

Although the PR person who wrote this obviously thinks this is a major breakthrough, these guys are using a method which was originally invented by Japanese researchers three years ago (google for "CNT super growth"). The Japanese guys have since focused on getting the fastest growth rate possible (I think it's about 0.2mm/min... if you want to figure out how many, many years it would take to grow a space elevator). There are lots of people working on improving this growth method, 18mm arrays may be the longest, but it seems to be in the same range as other people working on the "super growth" method. That doesn't diminish this research, rather it means that this method is very likely to work in the long run for industrial scale growth of nanotubes for materials (more simply, it's easily reproducible, and people want "nano-enhanced" golf clubs).

Isolated nanotubes have been grown longer than this (I've grown isolated nanotubes longer than this, and I'm not a growth specialist), as have bundles of nanotubes. This is the longest array of pure, aligned, continuous nanotubes.

Re:One more step toward a space elevator?

[evanbd]

It's not about the fuel prices. Never has been, and won't be for the foreseeable future. Propellant is cheap, it's the vehicle that's expensive. Elon Musk of SpaceX was recently quoted as saying propellant costs are comparable to the accounting errors.

Remember that the space elevator has to supply all the energy to the payload too, but it has to get it in a much more expensive form -- like electricity beamed from the ground by lasers or some such. Rockets aren't actually all that energy inefficient in comparison.

I used to be a huge fan of the space elevator idea, but then I started looking what those same materials do to rockets. SSTO is just the start. And remember, those materials will change rockets long before they make a space elevator.

Of course, I am a rocket engineer, so I might be a little biased, but I've also examined the problem in some detail :)