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New Threadlike Carbon Nanotube Fiber Unveiled
Zothecula writes "At about 100 times the strength of steel and a sixth the weight, with impressive electrical conductive properties, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have promised much since their discovery in 1991. The problem has been translating their impressive nanoscale properties into real-world applications on the macro scale. Researchers have now unveiled a new CNT fiber that conducts heat and electricity like a metal wire, is very strong like carbon fiber, and is flexible like a textile thread."
They'd never allow it.
When do we start building the space elevator?
Technoli
They gave a line made of CNT to birds to see if they were able to carry a coconut with it.
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Why not use units here? I have no fucking clue how wide a strand of DNA is. And which strength are we talking about? Tensile? Sheer?
The published ultimate tensile strengths of the CNT fibers in this work is well below that of aerospace-grade carbon fiber. They have a big gap to bridge before the CNTs can be of any use for building airplanes, let alone space elevators. Not saying that it can't be accomplished, but that this not yet a major breakthrough.
Probably not... but copper and aluminium are finite resources. Sooner or later, we'll run out. Carbon, on the other hand, we have no shortage of.
Now I can't buy any cables till they replace them with this. Damn you, technology.
Another question, what happens if you expose these to a camera flash?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=camera-flash-prompts-carb
The article mentions that it still has incredibly high textile strength, and shows a small fiber holding up a light (not much, but still).
I think that cost would scale down well since it's very similar to other material handling.
Right now, a large part of the cost and problems with data cables are the really thin wires -- we'd like them to be thinner, but can't make them any thinner without making the cable too brittle. I purposely buy extra-thick data cables merely to reduce problems in the field due to flex. If these flex well, that's a huge boon.....but then, do these survive soldering or crimping? Or am I going to have to teach my techs to sew?
Probably not... but copper and aluminium are finite resources. Sooner or later, we'll run out. Carbon, on the other hand, we have no shortage of.
Actually, in the Earth's crust, aluminum is more common than carbon by a factor of about 200. Only oxygen and silicon are more common. Source.
Actually, in the Earth's crust, aluminum is more common than carbon by a factor of about 200. Only oxygen and silicon are more common. Source.
Talk to a chemEng about the nightmare of aluminium refining. Its not just that the hall process takes a lot of electricity mostly from burning coal, but it only works with alumina. You gotta run raw bauxite thru the Bayer process which is a whole nother PITA to pre-refine it before it hits the electrochemical cells as alumina. Most bauxite comes from Australia and Brazil, and there's only a "couple centuries worth" and then thats it for bauxite, so aside from recycling it'll be back to the old days before the Hall process where Aluminum was basically a precious metal. Aluminum really is a huge unholy pain in the ass to refine into usable metal.
Its kinda like nitrogen. Plants REALLY need nitrogen. But we all live in a great seemingly infinite pool of nitrogen gas, you say so whats the problem. Yeah but biochemically its a PITA to use N2 straight outta the air, so it (mostly) doesn't happen. Leading to all kinds of chemEng foolishness with ammonia and nitrogen fixing bacteria on legumes etc etc.
Having some atoms laying around doesn't mean they're convenient to use, or practical to use, or possible to use.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Single mode optical fiber is a waveguide already. Think about it...
I would have to think for awhile about the velocity of propagation. I think Vp would be higher for a hollow (vacuum) carbon nanotube optical fiber which might be an advantage.
I know its barely theoretically possible to make a hollow titanium sphere that is strong enough to hold a vacuum, barely, so it'll float, but not engineering practical to make it. I wonder if you could make a CNT tube that would float in the air. That would certainly reduce optical fiber costs, if you only needed a tower/pole at each end of the run, plus or minus wind forces I guess. If nothing else I think CNT optical fiber would be lighter than glass fiber, for aerospace or whatever. Pity its flammable.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'm more interested in if this is cheap or not in mass quantities and practical to be used for wires..
The meth head copper thieves are not going to be happy when this stuff gets deployed.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The question isn't whether this stuff is strong enough or conductive enough, it's whether it's expensive enough to be used in Monster cables.
Are these going to be called CNT Hairs?
You have to take standard resource reserve estimates with a grain of salt. Unless they specifically analyze unconventional resources, and all resources at multiple price points above the present market price, you are getting an extremely conservative lower bound estimate on the real resources.
It would be remarkable if the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust (8.2%) would be so "limited in distribution". Bauxite is around 40% aluminum, a modest 5-fold enrichment over the crustal average, there are vast quantities of material (e.g. aluminum clays like kaolin) that are nearly as high, and a commercial production process is already being brought to market: http://www.ammg.com.au/download/IndMin%20-%20Meckering%20making%20alumina%20from%20kaolin%20-%20Sept%2012.pdf . In two hundred years exploiting other aluminum resources won't be a problem.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The extent of nano-tube regulation in California was passing a bill (AB289) that authorizes the Department of Toxic Substances Control to request information on environmental and health impacts from nanotube manufacturers and importers. It was authorized to collect information from the industry to use in evaluating hazards and risks (a process completed in 2009).
That's it.
No ban. Not even any regulation at all, whatsoever.
And it seems perfectly reasonable for the DTSC to collect such information. It is not as if completely novel materials, to which humans and other living things have never before been exposed, have never shown any harmful effects.
The California hating automatic reflex - much easier than taking the trouble to actually learn things.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Talk to a chemEng about the nightmare of aluminium refining.
The process of making this fiber is to dissolve CNTs in a super-acid and then wet-spinning them into threads. Apparently the key to this process is the same one use to make Twaron.
I'm not sure how this process has been adapted to make CNT fibres, but at least in the case of Twaron and Kevlar, dissolving the polymers in normal acids for powderization is a problem so they use a special patented process to do this which consists of NMP and some other stuff. Then they have to wet-spin it into threads from a solution that's pretty much 100% acid (according to the wikipedia, they dissolve the polymer powder by mixing it with frozen 100% sulfuric acid in powder form and gently heating it).
On the surface, it sounds to me that this is a similar level of PITA as refining aluminum...