Producing carbon nanotubes on an industrial scale
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Carbon nanotubes promise to revolutionize everything from medicine to electronics and power generation. Unfortunately nanotubes are notoriously hard to work with and chemists worldwide have struggled for years to even make them. Now researchers have unveiled a method for the industrial-scale processing of pure carbon nanotube fibers that builds upon the tried-and-true processes that chemical firms have used for decades to produce plastics.
One of the main reasons plastic is so cheap is because of the massive throughput that’s possible with fluid processing. Polymers can be melted or dissolved and processed as fluids by the train-car load and adopting the same technique to allow the processing of carbon nanotubes as fluids opens up all of the fluid-processing technology that has been developed for polymers.
The technique developed by scientists at Rice University builds upon a 2003 Rice discovery of a way to dissolve large amounts of pure nanotubes in strong acidic solvents like sulfuric acid. The research team subsequently found that nanotubes in these solutions aligned themselves, like spaghetti in a package, to form liquid crystals that could be spun into monofilament fibers about the size of a human hair.
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