Guest_Jim_* Posted May 7, 2015 Posted May 7, 2015 Carbon nanotubes are an amazing material with great potential for various applications. This is thanks to their amazing strength and electrical properties, but getting them into usable forms can be difficult. Researchers at North Carolina State University and the Suzhou Institute of Nano-Science and Nano-Biotics in China have succeeded in developing a method to create large films of CNTs stronger than any that came before it. Carbon nanotubes are a form of pure carbon and are among the strongest materials known to man, despite also being among the smallest. To utilize this strength, they have to be made into larger structures, like threads or films. The better aligned the nanotubes are within these structures, the better the properties of the final structure will be, but aligning a bunch of nanotubes a thousand times smaller than human hair tends not to be easy. Yet that is what the researchers have achieved by exploiting the imperfections of surgical blades. To the naked eye, these blades will look perfectly straight, but if one looks closer with a microscope, microscale fissures will become visible along the cutting edge. The researchers realized these fissures could be used as a kind of comb to straighten the nanotubes, just by drawing them over the blades. The resulting films made from the microcombed nanotubes have more than double the tensile strength of regular CNT films, at over 3 gigapascals, compared to just 1.5, and some 80% better conductance. Despite that though, there is still room for improvement with this method. Right now though, the researchers are looking for an industry partner to help scale up the method for large-scale production, which, theoretically, should be easy. Source: North Carolina State University Back to original news post Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
That_Guy Posted May 8, 2015 Posted May 8, 2015 Maybe they should partner up with Japanese Obayashi corp who is set to build and elevator to space using nanotubes and from what i've read they're just looking for what this method has to offer Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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