Aerospace
Spools of Super-Strong Carbon Nanotube Fibers - In an Hour
Researchers are now able to quickly produce fibers from microscopic carbon nanotubes. The method developed by the Rice University lab of chemist Matteo Pasquali allows researchers to make short lengths of strong, conductive fibers from bulk nanotubes in about an hour. The work complements Pasquali's pioneering 2013 method to spin full spools of thread-like nanotube fibers for aerospace, automotive, medical, and smart-clothing applications.
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Transcript
00:00:00 [Music] so this is a jar of carbon nanotubes and for the past 20 years our lab and many other labs around the world at war town how do you go from this job has a structured narratives to something like this where the nanotubes are laid into continuous fibers and they can be used into you applications for electrical conduction for strength for thermal
00:00:31 conduction for all intents and purposes these are microscopic fibers made of manatees but it's microscopic depending on the manatee as we use we get different fibers so the properties of this fiber over here are not the same as a property of this fiber over here and it turns out that the process for connecting the properties of these nanotubes to this fiber it's laborious
00:00:57 can take a month and it takes a large amount of material so the question we're trying to answer is which Nana T's make the best fibers when we try to develop the highest quality or highest performing carbon nanofibers we want to be able to experiment with the materials that we get from main manufacturers very quickly and sometimes we only receive a small quantity of
00:01:20 materials so this process the purpose of it is to sort of down scale so we can use smaller quantities of materials from carbon energy manufacturers and then speed things up so we can evaluate the properties in a carbon nanotube fiber that we produce much more rapidly so that we can characterize what the optimal performance will be for any given material where are we well it's
00:01:45 metal properties in Sumatra cost which is a great place to be for properties now we're within striking distance of metals in fact if you take the electrical conductivity of these fibers you divided by the density you have to remember these are very low density materials they're made of carbon you have essentially the same properties a copter on a pound per pound or kilo
00:02:12 per kilo basis yet to put it in perspective we're still talking about over an order of magnitude higher costs than high-performance carbon fibers which are still considered the specialty premium material so there's more work to do but the field is still young we're all about 25 year old as a material field and progress continues to be very strong
00:02:40 [Music] you