1. Dr. Xiangwu Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, hydroentangling treats the stack of unentangled fibers as a whole to produce strong fabrics or membranes, and hence it is an excellent method to assemble carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which are too small to be manipulated individually. The continuous hydroentangling process used in the textile industry is able to produce nonwovens at a speed up to 400 meters per minute. [H/T to reader Brock one of these links]
Zhang demonstrated that the tensile strength of hydroentangled CNT membrane with a thickness of 100 µm is 51 MPa, which is three times greater than that of filtration-produced CNT buckypaper.
“By the end of next year we should have a buckypaper composite as strong as IM7, and it’s 35 percent lighter,” Wang said.
Buckypaper now is being made only in the laboratory, but Florida State is in the early stages of spinning out a company to make commercial buckypaper.
One challenge is that the tubes clump together at odd angles, limiting their strength in buckypaper. Wang and his fellow researchers found a solution: Exposing the tubes to high magnetism causes most of them to line up in the same direction, increasing their collective strength.
[H/T to commenter eternal carrot for figures on IM7 material
IM7/8551-7A composite beams: The corresponding longitudinal modulus and failure loading were found to be 124.96 GPa and 782 MPa, respectively.
The loading thickness was 1.29mm, 2.80 mm and 1.83 mm for three samples. [not 0.1 mm or 100 microns for the North Carolina material.]
3. Nanocomp Technologies, a startup, has also produced large sheets of carbon nanotubes.
FURTHER READING
Florida states High performance Material Institute website
Xiangwu Zhang’s site at the University of North Carolina
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has empirically developed a rule of thumb that a 10 percent reduction in vehicle weight improves fuel economy by 5 to 7 percent.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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