Nano Tubing

Have you ever noticed that research and development tends to focus on the hot topic of the time, rather than having uniform discoveries and research?  There are a couple of reasons for it.  First, it is extremely difficult to find good Ph.D. dissertation topics that have not already been endlessly researched.  Many a student will spend a year or two, trawling for a topic, since a dissertation committee will not approve a topic that does not allow for innovative and original research.  It is much easier to have a topic approved for an emerging technology, because the published literature is scarce.

As engineers and scientists, we also have to sell our ideas and concepts.  In any almost any organization I know, there tens and hundreds more ideas than available funding.  So what gets funding?  Ideas that are splashy and new. 

A splashy and new technology now appearing in the media is carbon nanotubes.  There are several forms of carbon such as: a) diamond, b) graphite, c) glassy carbon, d) many more, and k) Buckministerfullerenes.  The last is not a misspelling - the form discovered in 1985 is named after architect Buckminister Fuller, who famously experimented with geodesic structures.   As you might guess, carbon nanotubes belong to the form or allotrope of carbon called Buckminsterfullerenes.

Chemically, carbon nanotubes have sp2 bonds which is the mixing of atomic orbitals between adjacent atoms which have strength exceeding the sp3 bonds of diamond.  Nanotubes are the strongest and stiffest materials known to mankind.  Because a nanotube can have a length to diameter ratio greater than one million, they are not as strong in compression, because the walls will buckle. 

As you can imagine when you turn researchers loose on a topic, there are many different variations of carbon nanotubes - multiwalled, torus, etc.  By changing the chemical structure, a nanotube can conduct currents 1000 times greater than copper and also conduct heat 20 times greater than copper.  This miracle material though, appears to endanger humans as discussed In study, researchers find nanotubes may pose health risks similar to asbestos.

Japan hopes to turn sci-fi into reality with elevator to the stars tells one of the more futuristic applications of nanotubes might be the long-desired space elevator.  Not as desirable as Star Trek's transporter, but much preferable to launching rockets through the atmosphere, the 22,000 mile elevator was originally proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise.  With the strength of carbon nanotubes and their ability to conduct electricity efficiently, Japanese scientists are hopeful about the material.  An international conference will be hosted in November to discuss a possible schedule for elevator construction.

Comments

[CharlesT]

The article wrongly credits Arthur Clarke with originating the concept. Clarke did a lot of cool stuff, but this was not original with him. The tensile type space elevator concept was invented independently at least 3 times between 1959 and 1975, all prior to Clarke's 1979 novel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

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