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China Produces Nano Fibre That Can Lift 160 Elephants - and a Space Elevator? (nzherald.co.nz)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the going-up dept.

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.

8 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Better Article from Ars by Crashmarik · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Better Article from Ars by Tough+Love · · Score: 5, Informative

      Let's not forget that carbon nanotubes make asbestos look like cotton candy, healthwise. In animal studies, exposure to CNTs induced sustained inflammation, fibrosis, lung cancer following long-term inhalation, and gene damage in the lung.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    2. Re:Better Article from Ars by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 4, Informative

      would of been

      "would've been". It's a contraction of "would have been".

      It would've been nice if (supposedly) bright, (supposedly) well educated people could spell....

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  2. Inquiring minds want to know by drewsup · · Score: 3, Informative

    Asian or African elephants, laden or unladen?

  3. Don't Forget by trabby · · Score: 5, Informative

    That even when the tech is ready:

    "The Space Elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke

  4. Re:Cross sectional area ? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    Quoting volume for a rope is not very helpful.

    Indeed. That is one of the stupidest metrics I have seen in a while.

    The cross sectional area would be much more interesting for saying how much it can carry.

    Well, they do say 80 gigapascals, which means 80 billion newtons per square meter. That is 8 million newtons per square cm, which in earth's gravity is equivalent to supporting ~800,000 kg, or 800 metric tonnes. Which is roughly the weight of 160 elephants.

    For a space elevator, an important metric is how much of its own length it can support. Carbon nanotubes have a density of about 2.5 gm/cc. So 800 tonnes is about 3200 km of fiber with a square cm cross section. TFA says that is enough, but that will get you only a tenth of the way to GEO.

  5. Re:Space elevator in a hurricane by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

    A space elevator has to be located on the equator, where there is no coriolis effect, and thus no hurricanes.

  6. Re:Cross sectional area ? by Solandri · · Score: 3, Informative
    After seeing load given in elephant weights, I was expecting cross sectional area to be given as a fraction of human hair width, and disappointed when I didn't see it. We could standardize elephants per hair as a new unit of pressure for the media.

    Well, they do say 80 gigapascals

    Do note that the glass fibers in regular fiberglass have a tensile strength approaching 5 GPa. So regular materials are within an order of magnitude of what's needed for a space elevator. Fiberglass' performance only craters when you have to use resin to hold disparate fibers together. That's the real challenge here - how to extrude a single really-long carbon nanotube, or glue a bunch of them together with minimal loss of strength. One of the reasons the use of metals is so widespread is because their crystalline grains slide against each other until they interlock, self-solving the "glue a bunch of them together" poblem.