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Large Sheets of Carbon Nanotubes Produced
StCredZero brings news that scientists have developed sheets of nanotubes that measure up to three feet by six feet, and they promise "slabs 100 square feet in area as soon as this summer." The developers see uses for the sheets in electromagnetic shields and airplane construction, and according to the Next Big Future blog, the sheets could also impact the development of solar sails.
"The sheets, which the company can produce on its single machine at a rate of one per day, are composed of a series of nanotubes each about a millimeter long, overlapping each other randomly to form a thin mat. The tensile strength of the mat ranges from 200 to 500 megapascals--a measure of how tough it is to break. A sheet of aluminum of equivalent thickness, for comparison, has a strength of 500 megapascals. If Nanocomp takes further steps to align the nanotubes, the strength jumps to 1,200 megapascals."
Rudimentary quantum computing can be done with the ballistic nature of how electrons flow through a sheet of graphene, or in this case, a carbon nanotube. Expect to see computing related articles.
If you don't understand what it mean to say that electrons move in a "ballistic" manner through these nanotubes, imagine that cool trick your math teach showed you in high school with marbles and pegs making a bell curve. Now imagine being able to change the outcome by removing a lot of peg, and then making your computer understand the results.
If this stuff is as strong as aluminum, why aren't we using it to actually build things like cars and buildings?
Has anyone leaked the details of how their process works beyond the little 'teaser' in the article? Could it be scaled down to personal size? Im thinking it would be great to add their process to a home 3D printer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(First off I work in this area) I know one we have tried purchasing these sheets in the past a couple time and have not been able to. They might be able to make them but the availability is still very low for any research or products.
It seems you're correct correct- do you suppose they've gotten around this?
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Bauxite isn't even a mineral. It's just a common industrial name for a kind of rock that includes a variety of minerals and is the most efficient way to produce aluminum using existing technologies. Any clay soil contains large quantities of aluminum. When the great clay shortage hits, I'm sure we'll have plenty of advance notice.
I'm not sure who Mr. Hall is, or what he has to do with naming conventions and misspellings, but the original name for Aluminum was "Alumium", which got changed to "Aluminum", before going through a final contortion to become "Aluminium". All three versions were created by Sir Humphry Davy, a British chemist, and the process took roughly 5 years so some confusion over the "proper" spelling is understandable. The usage of Aluminum over Aluminium in the US seems largely due to the fact that Websters Dictionary stuck with his second version of the word.
I strongly suspect that the tensile strength quoted is actually a typo by the reporter. Either that or he got his facts seriously wrong. It is unfathomable to me how a sheet of carbon nanotubes would be LESS strong than an equivalent sheet of aluminum. And any company that created such a wimpy sheet of nanotubes sure wouldn't be boasting about it.
Peter