Nanotubes in Space

I guess space exploration is on inventors minds, or I should say, in their pocketbooks. The news on nanotubes is the latest space applications. They even sent a new nanotube sensor on the last shuttle mission to test how well a nanotube smoke detector would work. Smoke doesn't travel up in zero g. It spreads out only with any drafts. Candles will put themselves out because there is not any gravity to make hot air rise and the flame quickly starves itself. (article)

Another big one was a new nanotube tape that is 4 times stickier than gecko's feet. Making it much more sticky than the best duct tape out there. Even though it uses the weak Van Der Waals interactions there are so many of them it makes up for it. Since it is not really glue it doesn't transfer or break, and cold doesn't effect it. Think of it as tiny branches with other tiny branches, and on and on. So the branches literally go into the material they are touching and become part of it through weak forces. Weak compared to normal bonds that are in all elements or compounds. This all means it is a tape that can be used in space. And that is a rare thing. (article)

Some other headlines that might make you go ah:

• Researchers at Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France have discovered a solution for storing hydrogen inside special carbon nanotubes. This storage solution may have important applications for the future of renewable energy economy, including hydrogen based cars. (article)
  
• A research team has identified a new biological function for a soccer ball-shaped nanoparticle called a buckyball – the ability to block allergic response, setting the stage for the development of new therapies for allergy. (article)

A little explanation on buckyballs: They are the smallest of the nanotubes with no tube shape. Just a perfect circle containing 60 carbon atoms. And to give you an idea of how few that is 3/4 of a pound of carbon would = 1 mole of carbon atoms = 6.02 * 10^23 atoms = 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. That means if you split it up among all 6 billion inhabitants of the earth each person would have 100,333,333,333,333 each

Summary of Nanotubes

Nanotechnology has become a common term in the news for the past few years. Anything microscopic in nature that is used to build something falls under the term. Relatively few new discoveries are made in the microscopic range. The one that has a lot of scientist exited is nanotubes. Some companies have reassigned their staff heavily to be at the forefront of the nanotube era. Others are calling it the next industrial revolution A history of the discovery and types of nanotubes can be found here.

What are nanotubes? The most common of which is a single wall carbon nanotube (SWNT, fullerene), at about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. Next in line is the multi-wall (MWNT) nanotube followed by nanohorns, nanorings, nanoeggs, and others. Scientists are announcing breakthroughs almost everyday. Already, over 320 products currently on the market contain nanotubes.

Nanotube Forest Multi-wall nanotube (MWNT)

Nanoring Buckyballs (C60) and variants, and single-wall nanotube (SWNT).

How will this affect computer organization and design? Recently a company announced the release of CMOS built with nanotubes. These will change how memory is used by allowing computers to have instant on and off states due to no latency requirements, and reorganize the hierarchy of cache by eliminating all other types, even up to the level of hard drives. Another announced the use of MWNT's to produce an LCD that can run on batteries for extended periods.

Nanotube Transistor

Research shows that capacitors made from nanotubes have the capacity of over 7 1/2 times more storage than today's super capacitors. These capacitors also allow controlled release so are able to act as a battery. New batteries already using this technology have hit the market recently, allowing much more storage, unlimited charges, and recharge times at around 5 minutes for a 90% charge.

Intel and others are devoting large amounts of research into ways to use nanotubes to develop future chips. Nanotubes change their electrical properties by changing their shape. They can be a super-conductor, semi-conductor, or a non-conductor depending on the twist. Researchers envision chips that reprogram themselves in order to generate the best use of the processor. If a program uses 90% floating point operations and 10% memory access then multiple processors would reorganize themselves to do floating point operations.

Scientist are working to a point where you pull out a wallet size computer. Unfold it, bend it so that it looks like a laptop, and place your hands down. That part would become the keyboard and the part bent up would become the screen. Need speakers, TV tuner, satellite receiver… It’s all just a program away. When the system can re-manufacture itself, what is the limit?

Recycle soot from Diesel fuel into Nanotubes

Thanks to Rudolf Diesel we have diesel engines. Gas is typically C₉H₂₀, while diesel fuel is typically C₁₄H₃₀. This equates to more power per molecule, and the much higher air compression rate makes it more efficient, so better gas mileage. But they pollute a lot more than gas engines. To stop this they removed most of the sulfur (clean diesel) and added a particle filter.
A breakthrough was announced in this article that uses the soot in this filter and:

We synthesized SWCNTs by laser vaporization of diesel soot that includes the fragments of various fullerenes formed during the combustion of light or heavy oil" Dr. Masaru Tachibana explained to Nanowerk. "We demonstrated that the fragments in the diesel soot are suitable precursors for the synthesis of SWCNTs. The success in the synthesis of SWCNTs from diesel soot shows that diesel soot can be recycled as a carbon source for the synthesis of SWCNTs

A cool new future awaits. Nanotubes will lead the way into the next revolution. Who knows what our future holds, but our children's future will not be recognizable to us.

Nanotubes: A short update

These little creations will change the world. Every day there is some announcement about a new application or breakthrough. These are a few of my favorites from the latest headlines in the exiting world of nanotubes:

Record breaking lengths. 2 Centimeters!

Using nanohorns for gene therapy

An exiting future for NANO MEMORY from this article:

• Nanochip uses three-wafer stacked MEMS technology along with arrays of atomic force read/write tips that CEO Gordon Knight said offer 200 times the density of any semiconductor. The company expects volume production by 2010 with 32 Gbytes per die, eventually ramping to 4 Tbytes per die by 2017. "Hopefully by then you'll have 10 to 20 terabytes in your cell phone," Knight said.
• Nanosys is working with Intel and Micron on quantum dot-enabled flash memory. In manufacturing, each mono-layer of quantum dots is electrically isolated, so leakage would only affect one dot. Intel has qualified the technology, which is forecast to be used commercially at the 35-nm node in 2009, according to Nanosys' Peter Garcia.
• Nantero's vision is for NRAM to become a "universal" memory, replacing other forms of memory. CEO Greg Schmergel said it is as fast as SRAM and as dense as DRAM while offering the nonvolatility of flash. The technology, which Nantero licenses to several manufacturing partners, uses carbon nanotubes to create nano-electromechanical bits that are bent up and down via van der Waals forces. It can scale down as far as a single carbon nanotube and is compatible with today's semiconductor manufacturing processes, said Schmergel.
• Texas Instruments CTO Hans Stork agreed that nano will bring some of its greatest impact to memory technology. "SRAM is the most difficult circuit to scale," he said, because of patterning challenges and also because at lower voltages numerous bits begin to fail and corrupt the stored data. Stork's keynote focus on the challenges of design in the deep-submicron world was a strong reminder that chip designers already live in the nanoscale world, counting on new nanotechnologies to enable future generations of electronics.

And my personal favorite quote from this article:

• Jeff Wacker, a futurist with Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., said the evolution of nanotech into the consumer arena will be marked by three phases.

  "I think there's the mild, I think there's the wild, and I think there's the magical," he said.

  At the "mild" end of the scale in the next few years are lighter, stronger, frictionless and more efficient upgrades to existing materials, such as in airplane wings, solar panels and batteries.

  At the "magical" conclusion, 10 years or more down the road, consumers can expect to see nano assemblers, minuscule factories using billions of molecule-size machines to build nearly any product imaginable out of a pile of raw materials.

This concludes another sporadic update from the world of nanotubes as Lance sees it.
Have a good day!