A Revolution in Engineering!?

10 times lighter but 500 times stronger than steel, 'buckypaper' could transform planes, cars

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) _ It's called "buckypaper" and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize 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 stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.

"All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward as sort of Holy Grails," said Wade Adams, a scientist at Rice University."

Sounds amazing! I wonder how long it will take to make its mass production economically feasible!


So what do you think? Is this more hype or is it the real deal of the future?

 

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Oh, and also, I wonder how available is this material... I didn't see that crucial information on the article...

 

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That was made out of carbon nanotube, wasn't it? Should be very feasible, though a bit pricey at the moment. While synthesis of carbon nanotubes have become cheaper lately it is not yet price efficient to use them for bulk production, I think.

One gram of crude nanotubes cost around 15 dollars. Higher quality stuff with specific length and radius are far more expensive.

 

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It's expensive, but unwoven carbon nanotube mat is already being produced by a New Hampshire company. It has applications in armor and lightning protection. Unfortunately it is only conductive at very high frequencies.

 

I wonder how it would perform as the shaft of a golf club or for a tennis racket?

 

I'd wonder how brittle the material is, being that, to my understanding, its molecular bonding is similar to that of diamonds or graphite. I'm blathering though, I really don't know too much about nanotech.

 

Buckypaper is just another name for Fullerenes....


Fullerenes are a family of carbon allotropes, molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, tube, or plane. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. Graphene is an example of a planar fullerene sheet. Fullerenes are similar in structure to graphite, which is composed of stacked sheets of linked hexagonal rings, but may also contain pentagonal (or sometimes heptagonal) rings that would prevent a sheet from being planar.

Fullerenes were discovered in 1985 by Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley at the University of Sussex and Rice University, and are named after Richard Buckminster Fuller.


In molecular beam experiments, discrete peaks were observed corresponding to molecules with the exact mass of sixty or seventy or more carbon atoms. In 1985, Harold Kroto (then of the University of Sussex), James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, from Rice University, discovered C60, and shortly thereafter came to discover the fullerenes. Kroto, Curl, and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in the discovery of this class of compounds.

C60 and other fullerenes were later noticed occurring outside the laboratory (e.g., in normal candle soot). By 1991, it was relatively easy to produce gram-sized samples of fullerene powder using the techniques of Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Krätschmer. Fullerene purification remains a challenge to chemists and to a large extent determines fullerene prices. So-called endohedral fullerenes have ions or small molecules incorporated inside the cage atoms. Fullerene is an unusual reactant in many organic reactions such as the Bingel reaction discovered in 1993. The first nanotubes were obtained in 1991.

Minute quantities of the fullerenes, in the form of C60, C70, C76, and C84 molecules, are produced in nature, hidden in soot and formed by lightning discharges in the atmosphere. Recently, Buckminsterfullerenes were found in a family of minerals known as Shungites in Karelia, Russia.

The existence of C60 was predicted in 1970 by Eiji Osawa of Toyohashi University of Technology. He noticed that the structure of a corannulene molecule was a subset of a soccer-ball shape, and he made the hypothesis that a full ball shape could also exist. His idea was reported in Japanese magazines, but did not reach Europe or America.[citation needed]

Buckminsterfullerene was named after Richard Buckminster Fuller, a noted architectural modeler who popularized the geodesic dome. Since buckminsterfullerenes have a similar shape to that sort of dome, the name was thought to be appropriate. As the discovery of the fullerene family came after buckminsterfullerene, the shortened name 'fullerene' was used to refer to the family of fullerenes.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fullerene

 

They are still expensive, but I remember not so long ago (maybe 8-9 years) it was over $1k/gram and the only people who used it for anything were lab researchers. The price is falling impressively fast.

 

It's somewhat brittle. In order to be flexible it is cut into thin strips. For most applications, it needs to be made into a composite with urethane or other material.

 

what kind of heat can these things take? I ask because it seems like only highly specialized applications (like rockets) have large enough budgets to use this kind of technology, at the moment.

 

Did anyone say "bullet proof jock-strap"
(or perhaps bullet proof bra?)

 

"Ten times lighter"???
Um, one-tenth as heavy maybe...

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And the link is dead now.

 

yea carbon nanotubes should be relatively affordable within a decade or two and then we can build a space elevator!!!

 

There are some many problems with space elevator it might not even fit a page...

 

Yeah, I think we've been over most aspects of the whole space elevator thing more than once in a recent thread.

 

Wait... Aren't fullerenes and buckyballs incredibly dangerous to people if they get suspended in air?
Even if the material is 500 times stronger than steel, you cannot prevent even a bit of fullerene from comming off and end up in the air.

 

Save the boobies!!!

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Reminds me of a question I had: why is it that Kevlar is used over carbon fiber in bullet proof vests even though (I think) carbon fiber has the higher tensile strength? Is it the shear strength? I work with both materials off and on in a design group at my college, and you'd be amazed how cutting a sheet of kevlar fiber will total a pair of scissors (and not even leave a clean cut, it's so resistant to a blade even).