Nanotube sheets

In-Depth

University of Texas at Dallas nanotechnologists and an Australian colleague at CSIRO have produced transparent carbon nanotube sheets that are stronger than the same-weight steel sheets.

(UTD) nanotechnologists and an Australian colleague at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (

) have produced transparent carbon nanotube sheets that are stronger than the same-weight steel sheets.

The results were reported in the August 19 issue of Science by Dr. Ray H. Baughman, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the UTD NanoTech Institute and a collaborator, Dr. Ken Atkinson from CSIRO.

Starting from chemically grown, self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in a forest, the sheets are produced at up to seven meters per minute by the coordinated rotation of a trillion nanotubes per minute for every centimetre of sheet width. By comparison, the production rate for commercial wool spinning is 20 metres per minute.

Unlike previous sheet fabrication methods using dispersions of nanotubes in liquids, which are quite slow, the fast dry-state process developed by the UTD-CSIRO team can use ultra-long nanotubes.

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