Don’t you
feel excited when you’re able to take a glance at the future? Materials made of carbon nanotubes give you
some taste of it – and they’re coming to stay.
But what are these carbon nanotubes?
Carbon
nanotubes (CNTs) are molecular-scale tubes of carbon atoms bonded together, and
when I say “nano” I really mean small – they have been constructed with length-to-diameter
ratio of up to 132,000,000:1, significantly larger than for any other material.
And that’s not even the most interesting
part; what is really cool is what you can do with that.
We are
talking about the strongest material yet discovered. The hardness of the bulk modulus of superhard phase
nanotubes is around 462 to 546 gigapascals (GPa), even higher than that of
diamond (420 GPa for single diamond crystal). The stiffness of the best
nanotubes can be as high as 1000 GPa which is approximately 5x higher than
steel. The tensile strength, or breaking
strain of nanotubes can be up to 63 GPa, around 50x higher than steel, and it
also has several other properties like kinetic (an inner nanotube core may
slide, almost without friction, within its outer nanotube shell), electrical (multi
walled carbon nanotubes with interconnected inner shells show
superconductivity), wave absorption (specially microwaves), thermal (good
conductors) and others. Ok, but in the
real world, what are the applications of these CNTs?
Current use
and application of nanotubes goes from bicycles components to tissue
engineering, but their potential reaches from civil engineering to space
elevators – Nasa is offering prizes of over $1 million to whoever can come up
with materials to make it happen and revolutionize the industry of space
tourism trips.
Unfortunately,
we can’t yet produce CNTs materials in a scale to do it so; the observation of
the longest carbon nanotubes was reported in 2009 of being astonishing
18.5 cm long, but don’t be sad: the good thing about the future is that it
keeps turning into present.
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