Marvellous
"It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers."
Thuggees will be delighted that the 21st century has something to offer their craft.
An international team of scientists has successfully found a way to spin tens of millions of carbon nanotubes into a flexible conductive thread that's a quarter of the thickness of human hair. "We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don't exist in any other material," said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali of Rice …
Last I read, it might, just might be possible to use nanotubes to construct a spave elevator. Would appreciate a link to the latest calculations/estimates though!
Arthur C Clarke (Fountains of Paradise) credits Buckminster Fullerine with playing a hand in the space-elevator concept, so it's pleasing that the only materuial that might make them a reality bears his name.
In the absence of a space elevator, headphone cables that don't fail would be nice.
Yeah but first you need the gazillionaires to actually finance the thing.
A good example what "savings" are for btw, as opposed to paper money freshly exchanged against bonds at the central bank.
Icon of what is nearest a tall-hat wearing space elevator baron shortly before he is taken down by antitrust for a natural space elevator monopoly. Which we can't have.
Space elevator might be nice idea, but, a conductor 40,000 KM long, going to an area on edge of charged particle belts and exposed to passing magnetic field bearing plasmas. What interactions could we get here ? Not to mention the charged areas in our atmosphere. Sprites are known to send jets 80km high, so I suspect electronic erosion at atmosphere end might be higher than expected.
@Denarius - Those are probably minor problems compared to the problem of a material strong enough to build a space elevator in the first place. Maybe they can harvest all that energy to power the thing or something.
I do have to admit though I just had a frightening mental image of what would happen if the tether for a space elevator got hit with a bolt of lightning powerful enough to vaporize a few millimeters of it.
Presumably it'd be easy enough to protect the cables from the elements by encasing them in a sheath?
Conductive as copper, 10 times stronger than steel and probably significantly lighter than aluminium (anyone seen density figures?)... sounds ideal!
I'm thinking BT might be interested too... as they seem to have decided not to bother running optical fibres beyond TC.
And so thin that birds cut themselves on it. Lightening strike and it burns away. One also asks what is used to secure it to support arms to pylons ? Diamonds ? Anything else would be cut thru. One of Nivens or Pournelles stories mentioned the possibility of the local "lads" enjoying putting this stuff up cross alleys with messy and fatal results.
@Denarius: Just because the cables can be thin doesn't mean they must be thin. If you wanted to use these CNT "threads" for high-voltage power transmission, you could easily braid them into a cable of suitable thickness for easy manipulation.
As for protecting against heat damage due to lightening strikes, I suspect that's tractable too. On existing runs, you might keep the existing AL-steel lines up, and run the CNT lines just beneath them on the same pylons. Run the power over the CNT lines and ground the AL-steel ones. They'll take the strikes (or dissipate enough charge that the strike will happen somewhere else, depending on terrain).
and we soaring pilots are already using carbon fiber, but it costs. Long threads will make much better spars. Perlan Project might finally be able to build their 300 kmh glider to get to 30,000 meters ! 90,000 feet in old language. A glider where only SR71s used to go. No not a typo, look it up.
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Respect to the lead researcher for actually going out of his way to name the student who made the breakthrough in 2009 - too many lead researchers these days simply claim the credit for themselves and add the name of the student as a 4-point footnote on page 2047 of their research paper.
In my (20+) year experience of physics research, I have never come across this unethical "claim credit" behaviour. The worst I have seen is "demoting" student names to be non-first authors, but often this can depend on how much of the actual paper write up the student actually did (or was capable of).
Generally, it is my impression that the lead researcher, being more well known, can promote the student all they like, but quite a lot of other researchers will just remember that there was some interesting work from "Thingy's group". This isn't a conspiracy, it's just that it's easier to remember the name of some guy they know as opposed to someone new.
I'm not going to claim my experience is universal; maybe I've been lucky, or maybe it's dependent on the particular (sub)fields or groups I've worked with. But I see no evidence that it's endemic.
In my (20+) year experience of physics research, I have never come across this unethical "claim credit" behaviour. The worst I have seen is "demoting" student names to be non-first authors, but often this can depend on how much of the actual paper write up the student actually did (or was capable of).
I've seen similar in CS - plenty of papers where a grad student is first or second author.
In Rhetoric and related fields, my other academic area, most papers are single-authored, and not infrequently by students; for multi-authored papers, it's usually the PI of record who's the first author, but I don't know of a case where a non-PI student who was significantly involved with the work didn't get an author credit. But things work differently in the humanities anyway - not necessarily better, just differently.
I do know of one case where a professor published a student's work under his own name, but that was in the 1960s, and he was forced to print a retraction.
And why do they never release the actual numbers? The last actually released mechanical property figures slipped drastically below the strength of steels above 2*mm* in length. Making them in visible quantities hasn't been a problem for years, the issue lies not with their 'difficult to work with' nature, but their utter sensitivity to thermal vacancy defects, defects that they *cannot* be made without and increase statisticallty with the temperature of manufacture. It is these defects that limit strength and the bigger you make them, the higher the probability of defetcs existing in the structure, a structure that requires perfection to achieve these magnificent strengths.
I'm not saying that the theoretical strength of these materials isn't incredible, but the thing about materials science is not what you hope it will achieve, but what thermodynamics lets you achieve.
I notice that no-one talks very much abotu the explosive strain energy contained in the structure, either. The propogation rate of energy release in these things at failure is about 50% higher than an equivalent mass of *TNT* :-D
Nylon started the plastics revolution. It was the first easy to produce long-chain polymer, from what I remember.
If this can be industrialized it certainly will be a game-changer. But is there a risk of it becoming the next Asbestos ? Its built of individual microscopic fibers, if they became disaggregated and then airborne it would be bad for the lungs... So it might be reserved to special uses until the safety aspects are verified...
Wouldn't work. In many cases they're thieves because they're too stupid to do anything else. That's why they end up nicking fibre optic cables, thinking it's copper, and get a surprise when the scrap dealer tells them second hand glass isn't worth buying.
Once carbon becomes viable for lecky transmission, copper prices will plummet, and the incentive to purloin it will at least partially go away.
And we can go back to putting it on our houses! Mmm - copper gutters, copper ridges, maybe even copper roofs...
My paint-and-plaster guy - an expert with faux finishes - wanted to paint my gutters with a faux-copper treatment. He used it on his own house and says it looks the part (he includes copper flakes and uses an acid wash to get verdigris). I had to turn him down; I knew I'd come home some day to find some idiot had torn my aluminum gutters off, thinking they were actually copper. It's a pity; copper half-rounds, maybe with some extraneous conductor heads, would look great on my Queen Anne.
Does anyone know what capacitive and conductive properties it has?
Can it be used for high speed signaling over great distances, without repeaters or losses?
I'm thinking of e.g. (Cat5 and -6) Ethernet cables, if they could be replaced by thin (possibly even flat) nanotube cables without the need for twisted pairs and no need to replace existing comm. hardware...
The article states that it is as conductive as copper (and 10x the tensile strength of steel). Capacitance is a function of the spacing of the conductors, so not really much different for a given arrangement and you'd probably want to keep twisted pairs due to the interference cancelling properties (emissions as well as signal corruption).
On the plus side it would be harder to break.
isn't there a warning around carbon nanotube derived materials having the same issues as asbestos for peoples lungs.
I remember mention of this from the 'blacker than a priests socks' material which made an appearance last year (also made from carbon nanotubes)
Personally I'd be a bit worried about wearing that until some research has been carried out
"isn't there a warning around carbon nanotube derived materials having the same issues as asbestos for peoples lungs."
When I was in the ATC (around 1999) we had a talk from one of the firemen while staying on base at RAF Sain Tathan. They were some of the first people to have to deal with carbon fibre in bad situations (it was being used in some aircraft parts e.g. rotor blades) and it was already known that burning it produces microscopic shards that outwardly resemble asbestos but nobody really knew more than that. On that basis they always attended aircraft fires where carbon fibre might be involved in full hazmat gear in case it turned out to be the new asbestos.
I presume that more health effects (or lack thereof) have been clarified since.
I presume that more health effects (or lack thereof) have been clarified since.
As a quick Google search reveals, there has been more than a little research done on the subject.
If this stuff is much finer than copper wires, what might that mean for motors, and electromagnets (and other "mundane" electrical based stuff)? Could it mean maglev technology (for example) suddenly becomes viable without requiring room temperature superconductors?