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China Produces Nano Fibre That Can Lift 160 Elephants - and a Space Elevator? (nzherald.co.nz)
Slashdot reader hackingbear quotes the NZ Herald: A research team from Tsinghua University in Beijing has developed a fibre they say is so strong it could even be used to build an elevator to space. They say just 1 cubic centimeter of the fibre — made from carbon nanotube — would not break under the weight of 160 elephants, or more than 800 tonnes. And that tiny piece of cable would weigh just 1.6 grams... The Chinese team has developed a new "ultralong" fibre from carbon nanotube that they say is stronger than anything seen before, patenting the technology and publishing part of their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology earlier this year...
The space elevator idea has remained in the realm of sci-fi, physical and mathematical models because there has been no material strong enough to make the super-light, ultra-strong cables needed... Now, the Tsinghua team, led by Wei Fei, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, says their latest carbon nanotube fibre has tensile strength of 80 gigapascals [over ten times more than the 7 gigapascals strenth NASA estimated to be required for a space elevator]... Chinese and Russian space scientists, for instance, are working together to find a safe, effective way to lower a fine, feather-light cable from a high-altitude orbit to the ground.
Wei also said his team was trying to get the carbon nanotube fibre into mass production for use in defense -- or to create super fast flywheels in a mechanical battery, which would have 40 times the energy density of a lithium battery.
The space elevator idea has remained in the realm of sci-fi, physical and mathematical models because there has been no material strong enough to make the super-light, ultra-strong cables needed... Now, the Tsinghua team, led by Wei Fei, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, says their latest carbon nanotube fibre has tensile strength of 80 gigapascals [over ten times more than the 7 gigapascals strenth NASA estimated to be required for a space elevator]... Chinese and Russian space scientists, for instance, are working together to find a safe, effective way to lower a fine, feather-light cable from a high-altitude orbit to the ground.
Wei also said his team was trying to get the carbon nanotube fibre into mass production for use in defense -- or to create super fast flywheels in a mechanical battery, which would have 40 times the energy density of a lithium battery.
Replace streetlights with a reflecting satellite in a 90 minute orbit ?
https://www.theguardian.com/sc...
Can it take damage and how cheap and fast is it to produce? If a tiny scratch will destroy whole rope is it nit very safe
https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
While the authors note that this work could find a home in "sports equipment, ballistic armour, aeronautics, astronautics and even space elevators," we're still a long way from any of that. Ideally, rather than synthesizing the nanotubes in centimeter-long chunks, we'd like to have some sort of continual production process. Still, the work is important in that it hints that there is a world beyond micrometer-scale nanotube fragments.
Nice to have my instinct confirmed that there would of been much more noise over this if Ultralong meant kilometers or or at least 10s of meters.
how was it that first use case imagined for this fibre become space elevator?
aren't there more down to earth already practicable use cases, where this fibre will replace some other fibre because it is better.
cease fire stand down,, there are mothers & children in every town.. some still calling this 'weather'? no heart no spirit no life..
The "NZ Herald" is breaking tech news! Thats the real story here.
aren't there more down to earth already practicable use cases, where this fibre will replace some other fibre because it is better?
Are there? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...we are fighting each other about words...because "words hurt"?
We are so screwed.
Yes, lifting 160 elephants.
imagine suspension or cable stay bridges made with this near invisible fibre.
Asian or African elephants, laden or unladen?
they are training all the weeger's to make this.
Huh?! What the hell does this have to do with China listening to Trumps phone calls?
What a fucking dummy that Trump guy is.
aren't there more down to earth already practicable use cases
I've come up with one! Use it to make stronger flywheels for energy storage.
Not like that very idea was mentioned in the fucking summary or anything.
Quoting volume for a rope is not very helpful. The cross sectional area would be much more interesting for saying how much it can carry.
Why would you want to lift 160 elephants in a space elevator?
That's about as dumb as a publicity stunt like shooting a sports car to Mars in a Rocket.
Oh, Wait....
Nuff said.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not on my watch. This looks like a job for: Space Force!
Why is that better than older technology?
Wouldn't you prefer bridges that you can inspect and where wear and tear is noticeable?
When it comes to new technology it tends to be fairly expensive.
What you are looking for is applications that couldn't be done before due to constraints in old materials.
Or markets where you can charge extra for snake oil.
Maybe you can make fishing line from it.
Near invisible surely will make the fish less suspicious, and what harm could it be to having super strong nearly invisible lines being lost in the lakes.
That even when the tech is ready:
"The Space Elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke
Near-invisible, huh? Birds trying to fly through it, coming out in sections.. people brushing against it, losing fingers... yakuza vat-grown ninjas swinging fake thumbs about on a spool of it, cutting people in half...
1 cubic centimetre weighs 1.6g and is able to hold 800 tonnes.
100,000cm per kilometre so 160Kg of fibre still able to hold more than 799 tonnes.
Approx. 2000Km to low earth orbit so 320 tonnes of fibre still able to hold 480 tonnes.
With a hell of a lot of assumptions and no other factors taken into consideration.
This is right now, today. Almost. $90 million launches 63800 kilos into low earth orbit. That is $1410/kilo. Misty eyed space elevator proponents claim $500/kilo. Eh. Putting aside for the moment the probability that that is a wild underestimate, if space elevator launch is 35% of the cost of rocket launch then the capital cost of a space elevator will never be recovered, never. Not ever.
Don't forget that any mass you hoist up this mythical elevator needs to achieve orbital velocity, just like a rocket does. That takes energy. Where does that come from, who pays for it? Why does this fairy tale keep coming back? Now let's build a Dyson Sphere, it's equally as probable.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You are aware that stress is measured in force per area, not elephants per volume?
Imagine you are Chinese scientists working on the nanofibres. You manage to produce a few. You can (1) announce an array of practicable use cases that will get buried in the Chinese Communist Party propaganda, or (2) eyes a-blazing, announce that the Space Elevators are now possible thus giving the Chinese Communist Part bragging rights that they have the most massive tubes of anyone and hence Taiwan should be theirs, they deserved to steal Tibet, and that in another 100 years the Uighurs will be merely a figment of the world's imagination seeing as their land is now populated by Han Chinese.
Imagine the Chinese gift for hyperbole outrunning your common sense.
... would we do with 160 elephants in space?
You made a space elevator localized entirely in your kitchen? May I see it? No.
They should just put them on reservations and use white people as slaves. Unless America wants to claim prior art and invalidate the patent on those great ideas.
Now, the Tsinghua team, led by Wei Fei, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, says their latest carbon nanotube fibre has tensile strength of 80 gigapascals
I would love a phone battery with a single flywheel. The centripetal force combine with newton's third law would result in a lot of very confused people who couldn't understand why it was so hard to flip their phone over.
Sadly, this is not even a joke. A space elevator will do more damage to the Earth than all previous events in the history of the planet combined.
Anti-Chinese sentiment and casual racism of many-a-slashdot-posters aside, here is a perfect example of what happens when a countries pours huge amounts of cash into R&D and education.
Rather than, say, in the US where the education budget is cut every year.
But hey... at lease you protecting yourselves from those caravans of migrants hundreds of miles from your borders.
Maybe the Chinese will let you ride their space elevator to work at the McDonald's in orbit ;)
According to "In Bruges" 1 American = 1 Elephant.
Seems the more outlandish the proposed use, the more nerds gobble it up!
Maybe they can also use it to make creimer's underwear last more than a week?
Chinese already did, in the Chinese sci-fi novel Three Body Problem, where the good guys construct something like that to cut a ship into pancake sections to kill the bad guys and recover something inside.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
The real question is:
Do we call it Scrith, or Twing? :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Lots of these Chinese "inventions" turn out to be absolute bunk and cooked results.
Will need to see it peer-reviewed by a country that doesn't reward theft and falsehood in the hard sciences.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
how was it that first use case imagined for this fibre become space elevator?
It wasn't; the elevator is only for the elephants and they forgot to mention the turtle,
... now ! 'Cause this is the first thing everyone thought of, right ?
I wouldn't get too excited about fantastic and amazing new developments coming out of China. From my understanding replicability tends to be low.
Probably because the fibre is currently impossible to manufacture outside a lab. Most applications can use other, cheaper fibres. Only the big dream projects like space elevators absolutely require something like a carbon nanotube fibre, so it's going to be something like a space elevator program that will turn this from a lab product into an industrial one.
Price to geo-stat orbit: 300 Euros per kilogram or less. Nice. We'd just assemble a massive spaceship and the first trip to mars would be an extended luxury cruise or something like that. Very nice. We'd be casually exploring the solar system and have a permanent residence on mars. Very nice indeed.
AFAIAC China should get right to it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Now I wonder, if a safe version of asbestos could be made...
Not possible. Everyone knows the Chinese are mindless automatons incapable of original thought. Had to have been stolen frim the USA, who ate the inventors of everything.
All I can think of now is a bunch of dead elephants adding to our space junk.
Especially if you're a pilot.
Ezekiel 23:20
Hey look, an armchair materials scientist. Did you think about wrapping the bundles in something wear and cut resistant like kevlar?
ZIP
It should be titled: China SAYS it produced Nano Fibre.....
E Proelio Veritas.
I hope this pans out....a space elevator would simplify access dramatically assuming environmental issues are worked out.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Have gnu, will travel.
I have long believed that a space elevator is unlikely to be feasible, unless under the auspices of an international body with no nation exerting control. It is really difficult to see how it could be protected in time of war, or even when the US, say, wanted to engineer an "accident" that removed China's, say, major economic and strategic advantage.
The idea of the space elevator is constantly out there, waiting just under the surface. Any technology that seems likely to bring the space elevator closer to reality re-ignites the idea like a spark.
I actually think this makes sense, since a working space elevator has more potential to immediately make radical changes to humanity's future than most others (AI being one of the most obvious exceptions.) A lot of great stuff (and some crappy stuff, too) could come from a practical space elevator.
You could drop two cables to places equidistant from the equator (N and S, obviously) and have them come together at a satellite above the equator. Then one of your cables could be in a hurricane's path.
Hmm, if you put the satellite far enough past geostationary to get some additional pull, you could have the cables be of different lengths and maybe sustain the satellite north or south of the equatorial plane?
I think this is about current reality, not the past.
Iâ(TM)ve even seen Chinese people complain that they should be able to pollute on the level of the industrial revolution because the West did. That makes no sense. The West had no method of not polluting nor did they know the effects. We now do. Unless the Chinese claim to have no knowledge of the effects or clean energy production methods, this makes no sense.
I lived on a reserve for a few years and then go there most summers. It sucks, but it isnâ(TM)t an active act of genocide happening. Whatâ(TM)s happening in Tibet and the Ugyurs is. The imperialism over the South China Sea and Taiwan are real things now.
I'm fairly sure- though I can't find the reference....
This is redundant research. The creation of this sort of fiber was first done in the USA around 2000. It's the manufacturing process which has not scaled up against economics. We don't know how to make vast quantities. Yet.
Also as I remember some resources were pulled from carbon based nano-fibers to research a diamond based product.
Again- pulling this from memory.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Well, it'd be money well-spent if it had the same marketing impact.
Nobody wanted space in the Falcon Heavy test launch mission, but after demonstrating the ability to launch heavy payloads to escape velocity SpaceX has established credibility for launching large, geostationary payloads.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If an elevator company can get the cost to orbit down to 35% of the market-owning competitor, they will ABSOLUTELY make back their cost of capital. This is not even accounting for your comparison of LEO to GEO cost estimates. If you could demonstrate technical feasibility investors would be bum rushing you to give you money.
Even worse, much of the cost of modern rocket launches is tied to marginal costs (fuel, personnel, pad rentals, etc.) The primary marginal cost of a space elevator is electricity (to run the winches). So, you do more to lower the unit cost by spreading the fixed costs over a larger number.
Elevators will be FAR cheaper.
Regarding the 'accelerate to orbital velocity' question, it's a little complicated. You have to pay to LIFT the payload, but the Earth's rotation will accelerate it as it ascends the tether. This steals a minuscule portion of the Earth's rotational energy, but you can add some back as you lower payloads back to Earth (the process works in reverse as you go down the tether). As far as the electricity to lift the payload, I would assume that solar power generation at the terminus satellite would be the best answer, but I have not seen authoritative analysis of it.
The most wonderful thing about the space elevator concept is that once you have even a small one working you can bootstrap yourself into bigger and better things.
That cable is a really small target. A better question is how long can you statistically expect it to stay viable? Whatever that answer is, you need to be able to either rebuild or replace in less than that time frame. Realistically, this implies multiple tethers in operation at all times, using tethers to make sure there is material on-hand in orbit for repair/replacement.
A bigger problem is exposure to elemental oxygen in the upper atmosphere and hard UV as you go higher.
Well, THAT is insightful. You should have logged in. That's a great comment.
No, he's wrong. The power to lift is absolutely at the terminus satellite. Probably electric winches powered by solar power installation on the terminus.
The problem is that rockets cost tend to be heavy on 'marginal' costs, i.e., shooting twice as many rockets costs twice as much more. Space elevator costs will (theoretically, at least) be very overhead concentrated, with very low marginal costs. This means that it is cheaper to do more, so everyone does more, so the unit cost plummets.
The acceleration to orbital velocity comes from the rotation of the Earth. As the payload rises, the tether swings backwards (westward) because the payload is moving too slowly. The lateral tilt of the tether begins to pull the payload faster. As it reaches the correct orbital velocity, the tether moves forward (eastward) and becomes vertical again. Operations will have to account for the swing and minimize oscillations.
On the other hand, this does provide some limited mechanism for the tether to 'duck' away from some orbital debris passes.
That is extremely insightful. Please log in. You are improving the discussion.
Almost
Well, no. No asteroids needed, thanks, although if somebody shows up with one that would be great. We'll send a starter weight up by rocket. Once the elevator is working we'll take up additional mass for building, shielding, and selling.
A stable loading area is a gimme. It will in all likelihood be inside a building at the base of the tether (if on land) or in the center of a large barge (if on water).
I don't know why there would be a steady rain of nano tubes from the tether, but it certainly will not be at the base. Anything falling from great height will move to the east.
We've been dealing with electrostatic forces for a long time. We'll deal with them here, too.
The van Allen radiation belts and UV, coupled with the ozone are the real problems I see.
As far as rockets being as reliable as other forms of transportation? Not even close. They aren't. Really. Go look at the numbers, they're not even close. And airplane level? That's laughable.
More importantly, even if the costs were the same, we would still build it if we could, because tether lifts do not suffer the extreme vibration and g-force loading of a rocket launch.
Bigger things, like wrenches and fasteners are probably beyond the current ability of our elephant based interception technology. Further research is clearly needed to develop larger and more energy absorbing elephants.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
The use of hyperfast flywheels in vehicles was predicted in a sci-fi novel I read 40+ years ago. In the novel, the flywheel was spun up in the factory. The stored energy lasted for the lifetime of the vehicle. Now if I only could recall the title...
Ok
Why are you assuming they're not alive, and that they wouldn't be returned?
Elephant space tourism would be awesome.
Or convenient conversion of 160 elephants to pools.
I'll believe them when they've made a mile of cable and suspended an extremely heavy object at the end.
...that well known SI unit: Elephants.
I have 165 elephants, and if I need to take them up to the roof I still have to make 2 trips. I'm going to hold off until the technology gets up to the 200 elephant range.
Nobody actually takes any of this seriously, do they?
Elephants hanging everywhere.
If you want a good story about a space elevator and what would happen if it fell, Read the book
Red Mars. by Kim Stanley Robinson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So is this a Chinese patent? I wouldn't have thought in America that you could patent something based on stolen technology