Industrially-Scalable Process for Making Carbon Nanotube Fibers
Scientists have created pure carbon nanotube fibers that combine many of the best features of highly conductive metal wires, strong carbon fibers, and pliable textile thread. A research team from Rice University, the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid, the U.S. Air Force, and Israel's Technion Institute created an industrially scalable process for making the threadlike fibers, which outperform commercially available products in many ways. In this video, view a demonstration of the fibers holding up an LED lightbulb weighing 50 grams. The fibers are also being used to run the current for power in the bulb.
Transcript
00:00:01 [Music] so I'm holding in my hand a spool of carbon nanot tube fibers so this is a continuous fiber it's about as thick as a human hair and it's about 50 m long on this single spool so this spool has trillions and trillions of carbon nanot tubes that are all aligned in the same direction along the axis of a fiber and they're very well packed and because of
00:00:31 this structure we now can translate the amazing properties of carbon nanot tubes which are nanoscale properties we can now translate it onto an engineering fiber which is something that we can handle on the microscopic engineering scale for applications so what you're looking at here is two bundles of our N Tube fiber that are holding up an LED light bulb
00:00:53 that weighs 50 g those fibers are also being used to run the current that's powering the bulb so this is demonstrating the multifunctionality of the fibers that they are strong enough to support the weight of the bulb and also have high enough conductivity to provide the current this is just some Fiber that I took off the drum which was not under controlled conditions but it's
00:01:13 still good fiber just we don't know exactly what the conditions were so we don't keep it but you can see that it has a lot of strength this thing is actually pretty heavy this is the spinning cylinder so we have carbon n tubes that are dissolved in a solvent which is chloros sophonic acid and this solution is a very viscous type
00:01:34 of material so it's um kind of like mayonnaise almost in viscosity and we're extruding it through 19 small holes and then winding it onto a drum this is a spool of the fiber uh after it's been spawned and wound this is one continuous filament so this was produced in a single spinning experiment uh where we spun a continuous filament and then we're able to wind it onto a spool like
00:02:00 this the machine we're sitting near here is the sem the scanning electron microscope and we use this to do high magnification Imaging of the surface of our fibers so we can get an idea of what the the structure is on a a microscopic scale micro this you know the scale of a couple of micrometers or a few nanometers tens of nanometers the cool
00:02:21 thing about it is you have a material that's very strong and highly conductive so it has properties of both metals and high strength materials like carbon fiber but on the other hand you can handle it like you would cotton because it's essentially a textile material not like a rigid material the main Improvement that uh in terms of our process versus other work that's already
00:02:42 been done on fabricating n fibers is that if you use a wet spinning process as we've developed here uh you have a very scalable process so you can you can easily scale up to make um more and more material without necessarily um increasing your costs sat makes ton which is one of the commercial brands of ppta fibers it's very similar to CER they used for high strength uh
00:03:07 applications like ballistic protections and because the method for making Taron is so similar to the method we use for making ner fibers taging are interested into working with us they are real artists in the art of fiber spinning and uh they have been able to move the technology so much faster than we could have done just by our ourselves