LONGECITY

Source: http://www.nature.co...l/050815-8.html

Nanotube sheets come of age

Clear, conductive sheets produced at high speed.

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They're soft, strong, and very, very long.

Large, transparent sheets of carbon nanotubes can now be produced at lightning speed. The new technique should allow the nanotubes to be used in commercial devices from heated car windows to flexible television screens.

"Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible," says Ray Baughman, a chemist from the University of Texas at Dallas, whose team unveils the ribbon in this week's Science.

Nanotubes are tiny cylinders of carbon atoms measuring just billionths of a metre across. They are light, strong, and conductive. But for years their promise has outweighed their utility, because the complicated processes involved in making devices from nanotubes were too slow and expensive to be used in large-scale manufacturing.

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. 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.

The ribbons are transparent, flexible, and conduct electricity. Weight for weight, they are stronger than steel sheets, yet a square kilometre of the material would weigh only 30 kilograms. "This is basically a new material," says Baughman.

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This is, as more than a few people have noted, a very good thing. The only thing better than this is getting sheets of arbitrarily long unbroken nanotubes...

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

Indeed. This would seem to be very good news for those intending to construct a space elevator.

http://www.techcentr...om/082405C.html

http://physicsweb.or...s/news/9/8/16/1

More good news.

I'm happy to hear this. Now I read the Nature materal on the new material
Edited by treonsverdery, 02 November 2006 - 06:11 AM.

picture from The article is at sciencemag.org/content/vol309/issue5738/images/large/309_1215_F1.jpeg sciencemag.org/content/vol309/i...09_1215_F1.jpeg
Sciencemag.org Sciencemag.org
Edited by treonsverdery, 02 November 2006 - 06:11 AM.

be the first to make my description of this technology at wikipedia.org wikipedia.org readable
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube z
Edited by treonsverdery, 02 November 2006 - 06:12 AM.