Nanotech Breakthrough

[filkertom]

This is really cool:

In today's edition of the journal Science, however, scientists from the University of Texas and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization report the creation of industry-ready sheets of materials made from nanotubes. Nanotubes are tiny carbon tubes with remarkable strength that are only a few times wider than atoms. They can also act as the semiconductors found in modern electronics.

"This is fundamentally a new material," says team leader Ray Baughman of the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson.

• Self-supporting, transparent and stronger than steel or high-strength plastics, the sheets are flexible and can be heated to emit light.
• A square mile of the thinnest sheets, about 2-millionths-of-an-inch thick, would weigh only about 170 pounds.
• In lab tests, the sheets demonstrated solar cell capabilities, using sunlight to produce electricity.

The team has developed an automated process that produced 2-3/4-inch-wide strips of nanotubes at a rate of about 47 feet per minute. Other methods take much longer to create nanotube sheets.

Comments

[infinitemorning.livejournal.com]

Holy crap! This is awesome! At last I have a material both flexible and strong enough to construct my origami death robots...

...never mind.

[kengr]

The link you gave gets a Yahoo error page

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Fixed it, with a new source: USA Today.

Sky Hook

[baronet.livejournal.com]

So to build a skyhook out to 2x geosync would take about 100 years of continuous production. For a single production line. If you have 100 production lines instead, then that's about a year of operation. Assuming that you aren't worrying about the cost..., but $10/lb to orbit is pretty compelling. Does the shuttle (when it flies) still cost $10,000 per pound of payload?

Re: Sky Hook

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

C'mon. A skyhook wouldn't be practical with this, I'd think.

Now, a lightsail....

Re: Sky Hook

[baronet.livejournal.com]

I haven't run through the physics personally, but my understanding of sky hooks is that the limiting factor is the weight to strength ratio of the material used to build the cable, and that even before carbon nanotubes, we were only off by a factor of 4 or so.

Trust a filker to make a lightsail out of transparent sheets. :-) Just a detail, I know, but an important one.

Re: Sky Hook

[mrfnord.livejournal.com]

Actually, if I crunch the numbers right, at the production rate of 47 feet per minute it'd take around 80 days to produce 60,000 miles worth of flexible nanotube sheet. A two-inch ribbon would do the job as a lead cable for a skyhook, and the more production lines the better.

Now we need to know the stuff's tensile strength.

Re: Sky Hook

[baronet.livejournal.com]

I think you accidentally multiplied by an extra 60, or calculated for 47 feet per *second*. At 47 feet per minute, you get ~2800 feet per hour or about 1/2 mile per hour, or 12 miles of ribbon per day. Although that does mean that my guess of 100 years was also off. It is more like 13 years. That'll teach me to try to do arithmetic.

Re: Sky Hook

[mrfnord.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I caught that about ten minutes after I posted. Ah well..

Catchy Name

[wayward-va.livejournal.com]

The research team suggests first using the nanotube sheets as transparent antennae for cars or as electrically heated windows. "We do need to think of a catchier name than 'nanotube sheets,' " Baughman says.


I've got a name they could use. How about 'Transparent Aluminum'?:)

Re: Catchy Name

[jss]

Aye, that's the ticket!