Nanotube sheets created at 10m/min

Rob Lister

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This may be the scientific breakthrough (in terms of profitability) of the year, or even decade. If this were a source other than Nature, I'd think it was hogwash.

snip

But now, nanotubes have gone into warp drive. Baughman's team can churn out up to ten metres of nanoribbon every minute, as easily as pulling a strip of sticky tape from a reel (see video ). This ribbon can be up to five centimetres wide, and after a simple wash in ethanol compacts to just 50 nanometres thick, making it 2,000 times thinner than a piece of paper.
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Source
 
Rasmus said:
Space Elevator!

Ras "drool" mus.
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[Mostly Ignorant Lister Opinion]
Space Elevator is at best like Cost Effective Fussion Power Stations, but double-quadruple the time scale of 'just fifty years away'.
[/Mostly Ignorant]
 
It's interesting that the applications mentioned are electrical, rather than mechanical.

Large scale mechanical applications (such as the space elevator) are still a long way off, although I think we've managed to demonstrate that getting long enough (100,000 km) fibres is thermodynamically possible (the bigger the molecule, the more likely you'll have defect - in a pseudo 1-D structure like a nanotube, the presence of a defect weakens it enormously). Once this calculation is written up I'll put up a link to it. It does require making the nanotubes using a relatively cool (chemical vapour deposition @ 1000 K, rather than arc discharge @ 3000 K) method, and plenty of them will still have enough defects to make them unusable.
 
Rob Lister said:
[Mostly Ignorant Lister Opinion]
Space Elevator is at best like Cost Effective Fussion Power Stations, but double-quadruple the time scale of 'just fifty years away'.
[/Mostly Ignorant]
Click to expand...

I think I read somewhere that NASA estimated a time-frame of just 20 years. (I've read that on the net, so i gotta be true ....)

But as far as I understood the biggest problem so far was that they couldn't produce nano tubes longer than just a few inches.

Now it is possible to at least look into the possibility of fabricating longer ropes; errors in individual fibres are just one problem there. But apparently conventional ropes are produced with individual fibres of only a few inches in length, so I am still hopeful there.

That being said, I think that 20 years is a very optimistic estimate - unless this refers to a point where a first rope can be deployed - rather than actually used to carry any weight despite its own.

Still, I am excited.

But what do I know about these things?

Rasmus.
 
Matabiri said:
(the bigger the molecule, the more likely you'll have defect - in a pseudo 1-D structure like a nanotube, the presence of a defect weakens it enormously)
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A link to a brief explanation of this problem (5.5 Mb pdf file). The rest of the paper is interesting to read, too - it's about super-strong steels. The reason for the nanotube interlude is that the author, a devout steels man, got annoyed with all the references to nanotubes being "stronger than steel". Steel is strong despite (and, ironically, because of) the presence of defects; nanotubes are only strong in the absence of defects.

www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2005/Hatfield.paper.pdf
 
i love this site. i learn so much from the links i find here. this is just an appreciation.
 
Could replace Kevlar in high-cost bowstrings.
Get the wagons in a circle!
 
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