Carbon nanotube cables cross new milestones

Electrons travel very quickly through a single nanotube, but the current slows down because electrons must jump from one nanotube to another.

This is the first time that researchers have made carbon nanotube cables that can carry as much current as copper wires. These nanotube cables help to transport more renewable energy to more distant power grids, provide lighter wires for more fuel-efficient vehicles and aircraft, and connect on low-power computer chips. Researchers at Rice University have now demonstrated carbon nanotube cables in practical systems and are designing production lines for commercial production.

The production of light and efficient carbon nanotube wires is as conductive as copper, which has been a goal of nanotechnology experts since the 1980s. A single carbon nanotube is a nano-sized hollow pure carbon tube that is mechanically strong and has an order of magnitude higher conductivity than copper. However, unless the carbon nanotubes are put together like this, the larger structures made with them do not have this extreme property of a single tube.

Years of fiddling in the lab to find the right assembly techniques and ingredients allowed the researchers to eventually make carbon nanotube cables as good as copper cables. The leaders of these researchers were professors of materials science at Rice University. Pulickel Ajayan and Enrique Barrera. The set of properties owned by this group's nanocables has so far been unprecedented. They are mechanically strong and flexible enough to knot or weave the threads. This material can carry about 100,000 amps of current per square centimeter, in the same quantity as the copper wire, but only weighs as much as one-sixth. Their superiority over copper as a metric is the so-called current density, which means that they should be able to transmit more electricity over longer distances without dissipating the heat into heat. This problem affects today's power grids and even Computer chip. Also, because they are made of carbon, not metal, they do not corrode.

Carbon nanotubes have different electrical conductivity, length and number of layers. The Rice University team found that the best long-term double-walled carbon nanotubes were provided by collaborators at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Electrons travel very quickly through a single nanotube, but the current slows down because electrons must jump from one nanotube to another. The longer the nanotubes are in a given length of wire, the fewer jumps these electrons must make.

The process of making nanocables begins with a double-walled nanotube that has been treated to remove impurities. Researchers added sulfuric acid to the nanotubes so that they could spread out to form a thin film. Then, they used tweezers to grip the edge of the film, began to make fibers, and pulled with a steady force to produce a long cable, similar to pulling and twisting wool when spinning yarns. They rinsed off the acid in the cable and exposed the cable to high temperature iodine vapor. Iodine penetrates the nanotubes in the cable, increasing the electrical conductivity of the cable without compromising its mechanical properties. The Rice University team showed that the cables are knotted together and made into larger lengths without affecting the conductivity.

To prove that the cable thus made can transmit the standard voltage, they used a cable to connect a fluorescent bulb to the wall outlet and let the bulb light up for several days. This work was described online, right in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Nano-Cables: These cables are made of carbon nanotubes and can carry as much current as copper wires. Source: MIT Technology Ventures "This is a definite proof of how mature these materials are becoming. The conductivity they can measure now exceeds that of ordinary metals," said Michael Strano, who is A professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did not participate in this work. He said that beyond the metal, "it represents a milestone."

"This is very exciting, especially considering that it is extremely important to reduce the weight of the (electrical) cables in aircraft and automobiles and improve fuel efficiency," Ray Baughman said. He is Texas. Director of the NanoTech Institute and professor of chemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas. Bowman did not participate in this study.

The aviation giant Boeing is one of the companies supporting the Rice University research team. Other collaborators and supporters include Chevron, the U.S. Department of Energy and NanoRidge Materials of Houston, USA.

"Our goal is to make an engineering product," said Rice University Barrera. "We believe that what we can do can be upgraded to a continuous production method." This group has already planned how to do this on the production line and is currently exploring the commercialization of some companies, but none of them disclosed any transactions. .

Although cables are good enough now and they can begin to seriously consider commercial applications, Ajian wants to do better. Ajian notes that so far they only tested the ability of a double-walled cable to carry direct current. This type of power comes from a wall socket and is used for short-distance transmissions on an airplane. This is an example. In the form of alternating current, power can be transmitted over long distances. Ajian said that a separate goal is to make these cables even more conductive than copper. There is a way to do this by using single-walled carbon nanotubes to make usable cables, which are actually more conductive but have always been very difficult to spun into fibers.

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