Tallahassee - It's called "buckypaper" and looks like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled. It could revolutionise the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.
Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity and disperses heat.
"All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward," said Wade Adams, a scientist at Rice University.
That idea - that there is great future promise for buckypaper and other derivatives of the ultra-tiny cylinders known as carbon nanotubes - has been floated for years.
But now researchers at Florida State University say they have made important progress that may soon turn hype into reality.
Buckypaper is made from tube-shaped carbon molecules 50 000 times thinner than a human hair. Due to its unique properties, it is envisioned as a wondrous new material for light, energy-efficient aircraft and cars, more powerful computers, improved TV screens and many other products.
The secret of its strength was the huge surface area of each nanotube, said Ben Wang, director of Florida State's High-Performance Materials Institute. "If you take a gram of nanotubes, just one gram, and if you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can cover about two-thirds of a football field."
It took years to get a new structural material certified for aviation use, Wang said, so he expected buckypaper's first uses would be for electromagnetic interference shielding and lightning-strike protection on aircraft.
The long-range goal was to build planes and cars with buckypaper composites.
"Nanotubes obviously are no longer just lab wonders. They have real-world potential. It's real." - Sapa-AP
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