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Buckyballs Polymerized Into Buckywires
KentuckyFC writes "Scientists have found a way to join buckyballs together so that they form buckywires. The wires form when buckyballs are dissolved in an aromatic hydrocarbon called 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene. The solvent links the balls together to make wires shaped like a string of pearls, which then precipitate out. This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial-scale manufacture. Buckywires ought to be efficient light harvesters because of their great surface area and the way they can conduct photon-liberated electrons. But perhaps the area of greatest interest is drug delivery. The researchers suggest that buckywires ought to be safer than carbon nanotubes because the production method is entirely metal-free. This contrasts with the production of nanotubes, which are formed in a reaction catalyzed by metallic nanoparticles."
"Bucky Balls create Pearl Necklace"
Who would have guessed?
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From: (PDF warning) http://www.davis-floyd.com/USERIMAGES/File/Bucky%20balls%20Fullereness%20and%20the%20future.pdf
being the strong, macroscopic person that you are, you get a hold of this, and you stretch it and stretch it and stretch it, and before it breaks you can stretch it to 20 or 30 percent longer than it was to begin with. The tensile strength is very high.
The indication is that when it finally does break, it doesn't break brittly but pulls out a little chain of carbon atoms the break is a plastic failure, not a brittle failure. One thing that we do know from actual tubes that have been made and distorted, is that you can take this tube and you can bend it. You can bend it so much that it buckles like a soda straw and then when you let go, it just snaps right back it does not break.
So, any tube, like the soda straw, as you begin to bend it, the material of the soda straw at the top of the bend has to stretch and underneath, on the inside of the bend, so that the bending stiffness of it depends on just how hard it is to stretch that material and this is the hardest material in the universe to stretch, so the stiffness of this little nanotube will be higher than any other object you can build out of the tinker toy set, forever and anon.
This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial-scale manufacture
No, it doesn't. There's no specificity, you can't control the polymerization to the extent needed to build something useful at the nanoscale, the wires are precipitating out of solution because they're attracted to themselves and each other more strongly than they're attracted to the solvent, that's a problem because you have no way of actually building anything with them. That's why people have been doing this sort of things with metal colloids for over a decade and there's been no "industrial-scale" use for them discovered in anything but colloidal form because you're basically just creating fancy-shaped aggregates. Until there's a technology available that will selectively aggregate nanoscale materials into arbitrary shapes (rather than a bunch of copies of the same repeating structure in solution) in a manner where certain shapes and functional units can be fixed to where they need to be on a chip or in a machine there isn't going to be a use.
Interesting chemistry, but to imagine that nanotech has any applications that require more synthetic control than bulk colloids or coatings within the next decade (or 5) is pure hype.
Clothlike photovolatics. You'd be quite literally wearing a patch of solar cells on your jacket, powering your appliances. Self-charging power cells, when it runs low, it'll tell you through audibles or a simple electroluminescent indicator. Just set it outside and it'll happily charge itself.
New processes for PV's to be built. Self-charging billboards using LED's or other low voltage lighting, eliminating high powered spots that pollute the night sky. I don't know how they would stand up to the rigors of space travel, but I'll bet they'll come up with something, perhaps laminating BB PV's in Lexan or a similiar transparent material.
Maybe a paint using them, making once again, self powered equipment, or hybrid wind generators that keep generating power even when the wind is calm!
How are they at being a wearing face? New generations of bearing materials that have an even lower friction coefficient than the current materials.
Also, new formulations for fuel using polymer chains of BB's maybe in order, making it an excellent replacement for sulfur as a lubricating additive.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
According to the image in the article, the individual buckyballs are linked by SP3 carbons (@-CH2-Phi-CH2-@) from the solvent. This means, there is no pi electron system, and therefore no electrical connectivity, between the buckyball entities. The physical characteristics of this material are vastly different from nanotubes, which are a single extended pi system. I highly doubt that this stuff can be a replacement for any application which requires long-distance electron flow, such as light harvesting, microelectronics, etc.