A major milestone reached in nanotechnology

[Denny Crane!]

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/38615/page1/

1/6 th as heavy, better at transporting electricity and ultimately a completely renewable resource. Who needs copper now, cheaper lighter cars and aircraft to boot.

[Ancient Aliens]

What's the cost of nanotubes vs copper tubes, though?

[justicar5]

What's the cost of nanotubes vs copper tubes, though?

a matter of getting the economies of scale going probably.

[Denny Crane!]

Well I can only assume there are no details because it hasn't been worked out yet but the fact they have major commercial backing suggests that they expect it to become cost competitive at some point, at present I'd assume it is still quite expensive:

Can Carbon Nanotubes Cut Energy Consumption?




Nanotubes are the scientific miracle material that has been looking for a job. Nanocomp says it can weave wires from them.
.



Single-walled-carbon nanotubes have properties that make them sound like they came from a science fiction novel.

They're stronger than steel, they conduct electricity and heat better than metals, they flex like plastics, and they're also incredibly lightweight. They can even be used to desalinate water.

Unfortunately, single-walled-carbon nanotubes have typically been incredibly expensive to make and difficult to incorporate into the regimentation of mass manufacturing. As this 2003 article shows, commercial viability always seems to be on the horizon.

Nanocomp Technologies, though, says it has come up with a manufacturing process that can get around a good portion of these problems. It grows comparatively long single-walled nanotubes – they can be measured in millimeters rather than microns or nanometers. Then, these nanotubes can be weaved into cords or sheets. These cords and sheets in turn can be fashioned into insulators or potentially wires. The picture above depicts what looks like a lawn and garden bag sliced open, but it is in fact a sheet of single-walled nanotubes.

"It looks like a black thread. We're making kilometers of it," said CEO Peter Antoinette. "We also make four-foot by eight-foot sheets every shift."

Although nanotubes can conduct electricity quite well, the company is initially pitching its product as an insulator for satellites and aircraft because the material weighs 90 percent less than current industry-standard materials. Cutting aircraft weight, of course, would lower fuel consumption.

"It takes $100,000 a pound to get something into orbit," he said. "We can save 200 to 500 pounds per satellite. In a 787 we can save over 8,000 pounds of weight."

Nanotube sheets could also be used to shield components from electromagnetic interference. "You could cover an airplane with it," Antoinette added.

Later, Nanocomp will try to sell it as a replacement for copper in wiring. Wire replacement would take years of scaling up manufacturing and passing reliability tests. (The qualification cycle for insulation, while difficult, is less intense.) Nonetheless, the potential gains are there. A substantial portion of the infrastructure of the electrical grid exists to keep heavy power lines from sagging; sagging increase the cost and losses along the line. With nanotubes serving as insulators and/or conductors, power lines, you could see relatively taut lines strung along a sparse number of poles.

And the grid is getting older by the day.

"Fifty years from now, we are going to face a major rewiring problem," he said.

Nanocomp's basic technique could be called strength in numbers, huge numbers. The company first injects a fuel and carrier gas into a furnace, which extracts carbon molecules from gases into nanotubes. Its process leads to relatively long tubes.

"It looks like cotton candy but only it is black," he said. "[Nanotubes] haven't worked in the past because they were too short."

The nanotubes are then essentially deposited into insulators or cables sort of the way kids might make sand art at the state fair. To make sheets, nanotubes are deposited on a membrane on a rotating drum. A single thread-like cable might sport ten 17th nanotubes across its diameter.

At these volumes, chirality, which describes the relationship of atoms to one another in a nanotube, doesn't matter, he argued. Chirality has been a stumbling block for researchers trying to make nanotube transistors because a slight change in the spatial relationship of the atoms can change one nanotube from being an electrical insulator to a semiconductor or a conductor. But that's when you have one nanotube connecting to the other. When you have billions, paths emerge. Electrical transmission isn't perfectly ballistic (a term used to describe nanotube conductivity) but it's good.

Right now, Nanocomp "is not yet close in price to copper," Antoinette said, which sells for $4 a pound. Nanocomp currently hopes to scale up to an 11,000-square-foot factory. A facility that size would allow it to make "millions of kilometers" or 50,000 square meters of nanotubes. Nanotube sheets would still cost a few hundred dollars a pound at this point, but they would start riding a downward cost curve like standard carbon fiber.

Even if it is more expensive I wonder what that weight saving would do to fuel costs on a double decker airbus over the lifespand of the aircraft?

I wonder how much it would save over 50 years of being grid installed and the improvements in electric transmission?

We'll see what happens once they have a factory which I assume is coming quickly.

[Jack04]

Carbon (and more specifically graphene) certainly seems to be the material of the future. Costs ought to drop rapidly once the infrastructure is up and running and, given that copper prices have risen sharply in recent years (and may continue to do so) it should become a better and better alternative.

[Magicman2051]

Graphene, cheap, easy to mass produce and has amazing potential.

Jack beat me to it

[Jack04]

I (briefly) met its co-discoverer. Nice guy.

[Rhaegar1]

Hoho gentleman, hold your horses! Although the potential of graphene, carbon fiber, nanotubes and other nano-carbon-based materials is hard to argue, and I firmly believe that in 200 years this may very well be called the beginning of the age of carbon (also due to the change in perception of carbon emission and the resulting change in energy infrastructure).

The claim that graphene is cheap and easy to mass produce could hardly be further from the truth. Just like carbon fiber still isn't use as main building material of cars graphene won't be used on a large scale in mass production goods for quit some time. Simply because it is not easy and cheap to produce. It's not nearly as cheap to process as metals and although I'm sincerely hoping the opposite, it won't be for a very long time. After all, it took us a couple of thousands of years to process iron into vehicle engine grade steel. I know development are going nearly infinitely faster at the moment then a thousand years ago it's way to optimistic to assume we will be seeing large amounts of 'carbon factories'

[Denny Crane!]

Hoho gentleman, hold your horses! Although the potential of graphene, carbon fiber, nanotubes and other nano-carbon-based materials is hard to argue, and I firmly believe that in 200 years this may very well be called the beginning of the age of carbon (also due to the change in perception of carbon emission and the resulting change in energy infrastructure).

Tell that to the guys who have the contracts and have the factory being built right now with the likes of Boeing as backers and expect to be producing hundreds of thousands of meters of the stuff with a capacity and cost per meter that will decrease.

Did you even read the OP?

The claim that graphene is cheap and easy to mass produce could hardly be further from the truth. Just like carbon fiber still isn't use as main building material of cars graphene won't be used on a large scale in mass production goods for quit some time. Simply because it is not easy and cheap to produce. It's not nearly as cheap to process as metals and although I'm sincerely hoping the opposite, it won't be for a very long time. After all, it took us a couple of thousands of years to process iron into vehicle engine grade steel. I know development are going nearly infinitely faster at the moment then a thousand years ago it's way to optimistic to assume we will be seeing large amounts of 'carbon factories'

Once again read the damn opening post it is most obvious you didn't. Being. Built. Now.

200 years from now

[Amorphos]

You don't want it to conduct heat for electric wires then you are losing electricity through heat.

Indeed! You want it to conduct electricity better and part of the problem is that copper wires do get hot and burn out. I have often noticed this at work when transformers get hot and crossed wires or overloaded wires overheat [sometimes they even catch fire].

Either way I still think nanotech is the way forwards ~ for now.

I love this kind of stuff.

[Rhaegar1]

Tell that to the guys who have the contracts and have the factory being built right now with the likes of Boeing as backers and expect to be producing hundreds of thousands of meters of the stuff with a capacity and cost per meter that will decrease.

Did you even read the OP?



Once again read the damn opening post it is most obvious you didn't. Being. Built. Now.

200 years from now

Well to be honest, I missed the second page of the article the first time around so I will tone down my initially a bit heated response on this post. Although I would like to point out that I still think it's pretty rude to smack some face palm smilies around as soon as someone has a different opinion then yourself, so I'll just be trying to tell you why you're making an ass of yourself putting them in your post.

first the second one: Do me a favor and read the sentence again where I am mentioning the number 200. I am pretty sure you will notice that in no way I was expressing an opinion that it would take so long for carbon-nano products and the like to have a solid place in society. I was merely expressing my opinion that historians in the year 2200 may very well call the year 2000 as roughly the beginning of the carbon age, you know, like iron age and stone age etc. I know that grammatically it may or may not be a perfect sentence but we can't all be native English speakers or have a knack for learning foreign languages.

Then the second one. Yes I did read the OP although initially not very well, as expressed above, but my reason for posting the earlier post was that in your first post you claimed:

1/6 th as heavy, better at transporting electricity and ultimately a completely renewable resource. Who needs copper now, cheaper lighter cars and aircraft to boot.

And a few posts after that Magicman2051 (who has a great movie taste, judging by his avatar) stated:

Graphene, cheap, easy to mass produce and has amazing potential.

The problem I had with these statements was that in the initial article you posted (the one you didn't believe I read) the terms cheap and easy to mass produce where nowhere expressed and on top of that go against anything that I know about the subject from reading previous articles attending (guest) lectures or talking to people who know something about the subject.

As you said, big companies like Boing backing it up shows they have faith in this production method but in my opinion it shows even more that Boing as a company is not afraid of investing money in something that probably won't pay out in quit some time. As an example I go back to carbon fibers which in theory should be made of a cheaper raw materials then metals either as well as having much more desirable properties then many metals. A quick wiki search however shows that carbon fibers where first produced in the 60's so it took half a century until the first commercial airplane that was largely made from carbon fibers was produced even though especially in flying carbon fibers would and should be considered to be the holy grail since its possibility to reduce weight so much.

So let me close by stating that I think the developments in graphene, and nanotubes is fascinating and I think a great opportunity for humanity to push the brinks of technology a lot further. That said I simply do not agree with the statement that graphene, carbon nanotubes or carbon fibers are cheap and easy to mass produce. It simply isn't true and won't be for the next couple of years either. Even with exploding metal prices, metals simply have a tremendous head start compared to carbon based building materials (steel excluded of course).

And on a personal note it would be greatly appreciated if in the future when you feel the need to accuse someone of not reading something you better make damn sure you're right and take the time to reread the post you're reacting on again. And try to skip the smilies in the future, it's a cheap and childish way to try humbling someone into silence because he's disagreeing with you.

[Denny Crane!]

Well to be honest, I missed the second page of the article the first time around so I will tone down my initially a bit heated response on this post. Although I would like to point out that I still think it's pretty rude to smack some face palm smilies around as soon as someone has a different opinion then yourself, so I'll just be trying to tell you why you're making an ass of yourself putting them in your post.

first the second one: Do me a favor and read the sentence again where I am mentioning the number 200. I am pretty sure you will notice that in no way I was expressing an opinion that it would take so long for carbon-nano products and the like to have a solid place in society. I was merely expressing my opinion that historians in the year 2200 may very well call the year 2000 as roughly the beginning of the carbon age, you know, like iron age and stone age etc. I know that grammatically it may or may not be a perfect sentence but we can't all be native English speakers or have a knack for learning foreign languages.

Then the second one. Yes I did read the OP although initially not very well, as expressed above, but my reason for posting the earlier post was that in your first post you claimed:

1/6 th as heavy, better at transporting electricity and ultimately a completely renewable resource. Who needs copper now, cheaper lighter cars and aircraft to boot.

And a few posts after that Magicman2051 (who has a great movie taste, judging by his avatar) stated:

Graphene, cheap, easy to mass produce and has amazing potential.

The problem I had with these statements was that in the initial article you posted (the one you didn't believe I read) the terms cheap and easy to mass produce where nowhere expressed and on top of that go against anything that I know about the subject from reading previous articles attending (guest) lectures or talking to people who know something about the subject.

Well it doesn't go against MIT and other things I've read so I'll stick with that opinion cheers.

As you said, big companies like Boing backing it up shows they have faith in this production method but in my opinion it shows even more that Boing as a company is not afraid of investing money in something that probably won't pay out in quit some time. As an example I go back to carbon fibers which in theory should be made of a cheaper raw materials then metals either as well as having much more desirable properties then many metals. A quick wiki search however shows that carbon fibers where first produced in the 60's so it took half a century until the first commercial airplane that was largely made from carbon fibers was produced even though especially in flying carbon fibers would and should be considered to be the holy grail since its possibility to reduce weight so much.

So let me close by stating that I think the developments in graphene, and nanotubes is fascinating and I think a great opportunity for humanity to push the brinks of technology a lot further. That said I simply do not agree with the statement that graphene, carbon nanotubes or carbon fibers are cheap and easy to mass produce. It simply isn't true and won't be for the next couple of years either. Even with exploding metal prices, metals simply have a tremendous head start compared to carbon based building materials (steel excluded of course).

And on a personal note it would be greatly appreciated if in the future when you feel the need to accuse someone of not reading something you better make damn sure you're right and take the time to reread the post you're reacting on again. And try to skip the smilies in the future, it's a cheap and childish way to try humbling someone into silence because he's disagreeing with you.

Christ you take a lot of offense to a few smilies. Grow up.

[justicar5]

Hoho gentleman, hold your horses! Although the potential of graphene, carbon fiber, nanotubes and other nano-carbon-based materials is hard to argue, and I firmly believe that in 200 years this may very well be called the beginning of the age of carbon (also due to the change in perception of carbon emission and the resulting change in energy infrastructure).

Diamond Age Neal Stephenson already coined the term :p

[Magicman2051]

I haven't had the honour of meeting anyone involved in the project, I followed it closely though, could be fascinatingly effective stuff. And if the Brits can keep most of the research and development local then it'll be a huge boon to the industry there.

[Jack04]

I haven't had the honour of meeting anyone involved in the project, I followed it closely though, could be fascinatingly effective stuff. And if the Brits can keep most of the research and development local then it'll be a huge boon to the industry there.

Chances of that happening are about zero. A lot of the research since its discovery has been done abroad. There simply isn't the available funding to keep it in predominantly in Britain. Either way, it has the potential to ramp up the efficiency of just about every electrical device in the world, so it hardly matters where the research is done in the long term, and it has brought a certain amount more interest and (I suspect) funding to physics in British universities, which is good.

[Aanker]

In these times of global economic struggle and pessimism (the latter of which troubles me the most), this is really what makes my day.

[Denny Crane!]

I haven't had the honour of meeting anyone involved in the project, I followed it closely though, could be fascinatingly effective stuff. And if the Brits can keep most of the research and development local then it'll be a huge boon to the industry there.

In these times of global economic struggle and pessimism (the latter of which troubles me the most), this is really what makes my day.

Yeah this would generate a lot of extra money, things getting cheaper and more efficient is just what we need like a bloody steroid shot for our economy sort of thing.

[Amorphos]

If possible to make, then artificial diamond wire [ in the same ilk as fibre-optic glass] would be even better, though very expensive. I saw a guy on a documentary with a diamond disk push it through an ice cube purely with the heat from his hand ~ now that’s what I call conductive.

Anyways, back to more realistic things, ya this nano-tech looks awesome.

[Denny Crane!]

If possible to make, then artificial diamond wire [ in the same ilk as fibre-optic glass] would be even better, though very expensive. I saw a guy on a documentary with a diamond disk push it through an ice cube purely with the heat from his hand ~ now that’s what I call conductive.

Anyways, back to more realistic things, ya this nano-tech looks awesome.

You don't want it to conduct heat for electric wires then you are losing electricity through heat.

[Portuguese Rebel]

We have to take in mind that as the major ore sites are being depleted and raw ore becomes more expensive industry will have to shift to other materials. It is unavoidable, since recovering metal from recycling is not cheap and efficient enough to keep our industries going.