I am writing my Master's thesis on the strength properties of single-wall carbon nanotubes, so I know a little about what's going on.
So far, both theoretical and experiment work confirms a yield strength of over 200 GPa which is about 100 times stronger than steel. SWNTs also have been shown to have a strain-to-failure of over 5% and that's just a confirmed lower bound.
The biggest challenge facing NTs in materials research is that they are very small and there is no known way to catalyze continued growth or grow individual tubes of high purity longer than 1 micron in length. The inter-tube van der Waal forces are the limiting factor in current nanotube rope strength characteristics, and gives a yield strength around 40 GPa.
The arc discharge method currently can produce about 1g per day. There is a newer production method developed at Rice University that uses a pulsed laser to vaporize a graphite target doped with metal particles. This process can produce 10g per day. For more information on this process, check out Dr. Smalley's publication list at:
http://cnst.rice.edu/respubs.html
Article #249, #252
Slashdot Mirror
I am writing my Master's thesis on the strength properties of single-wall carbon nanotubes, so I know a little about what's going on. So far, both theoretical and experiment work confirms a yield strength of over 200 GPa which is about 100 times stronger than steel. SWNTs also have been shown to have a strain-to-failure of over 5% and that's just a confirmed lower bound. The biggest challenge facing NTs in materials research is that they are very small and there is no known way to catalyze continued growth or grow individual tubes of high purity longer than 1 micron in length. The inter-tube van der Waal forces are the limiting factor in current nanotube rope strength characteristics, and gives a yield strength around 40 GPa.
The arc discharge method currently can produce about 1g per day. There is a newer production method developed at Rice University that uses a pulsed laser to vaporize a graphite target doped with metal particles. This process can produce 10g per day. For more information on this process, check out Dr. Smalley's publication list at: http://cnst.rice.edu/respubs.html Article #249, #252