carbon nanotubes already are being commercially produced...
Yup. I linked to what appears to be the largest supplier in the US, above.
...for aerospace applications
THIS is the bit I doubt.
Thing is, the company I linked just sells the actual nanotubes. You need a pretty serious microscope to even see them, and in terms of structural material, it's just a pile of (very stiff/strong) microscopic sticks.
To do useful engineering things with them, they need to be turned into a bulk material with known mechanical properties. The most plausible first step to that is turning a bunch of tubes into a fibre, probably by forming a composite with some other material such as epoxy resin. There are somereports that a joint team from the University of Texas and Trinity College Dublin managed to do this in moderately useful quantities earlier this year, producing hundred-metre long threads.
However, threads do not make an aeroplane. The next obvious step would be to take those threads, weave them into a cloth, then use THAT as the basis for another composite material, much like current (x)-Fibre Reinforced Plastics. With the thread coming out of the labs a few hundred metres at a time, and the primary ingredient of the thread costing $500 per gram, making bulk material is likely to be slow and very expensive.
As soon as anyone does produce the stuff in sensible quantities, the aerospace industry will be all over it. Even if it's not strong enough for a space elevator (I doubt it will be) it's still likely to have mechanical properties that will have aerospace engineers foaming at the mouth. But for now, I can't see any evidence that anyone is producing engineering quantities of this stuff.
All that said, I am willing to stand corrected. Despite my scepticism, I'd love to be proved wrong here.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2003-09-16 12:06 (UTC)Thing is, the company I linked just sells the actual nanotubes. You need a pretty serious microscope to even see them, and in terms of structural material, it's just a pile of (very stiff/strong) microscopic sticks.
To do useful engineering things with them, they need to be turned into a bulk material with known mechanical properties. The most plausible first step to that is turning a bunch of tubes into a fibre, probably by forming a composite with some other material such as epoxy resin. There are some reports that a joint team from the University of Texas and Trinity College Dublin managed to do this in moderately useful quantities earlier this year, producing hundred-metre long threads.
However, threads do not make an aeroplane. The next obvious step would be to take those threads, weave them into a cloth, then use THAT as the basis for another composite material, much like current (x)-Fibre Reinforced Plastics. With the thread coming out of the labs a few hundred metres at a time, and the primary ingredient of the thread costing $500 per gram, making bulk material is likely to be slow and very expensive.
As soon as anyone does produce the stuff in sensible quantities, the aerospace industry will be all over it. Even if it's not strong enough for a space elevator (I doubt it will be) it's still likely to have mechanical properties that will have aerospace engineers foaming at the mouth. But for now, I can't see any evidence that anyone is producing engineering quantities of this stuff.
All that said, I am willing to stand corrected. Despite my scepticism, I'd love to be proved wrong here.