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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.
there would of been much more noise over this if Ultralong meant kilometers or or at least 10s of meters.
Actually, if a single nanotube is 1 cm, that is enough. The length would be 10M times the diameter, and the Van der Waals attraction between adjacent tubes along their entire length would far exceed the strength of the covalent link between carbon atoms in a tube.
If you were building a space elevator to GEO (36,000 km), the difference is strength between using a fiber constructed from 1 cm tubes and 1 km tubes would be negligible.
Graphite holds together, but only just. Pencils work because a tiny amount of shear force is enough to cause layers of it to come off (and that's the direction that you'd be fighting if you tried to pull two tubes apart that were stuck in this way). A child can pull a lump of graphite apart.
This has always been the problem with potential space-elevator materials. It's relatively easy to make something that's strong enough over a very short distance, but none of the proposed materials can either be synthesised in a single long chunk (yet?) or can be woven together to form a rope that maintains anything like the same tensile strength.
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