MadSci Network: Chemistry
Query:

Re: What do you think nanotubes will be used for in the future?

Date: Thu Nov 19 09:40:17 1998
Posted By: Dan Berger, Faculty Chemistry/Science, Bluffton College
Area of science: Chemistry
ID: 911261790.Ch
Message:

What do you think nanotubes will be used for in the future?
Do you think nanotubes are valuable to the human race?


Carbon nanotubes are similar in general structure to bucky balls, that is, they are "tubes of graphite," consisting of graphite-like sheets "rolled" into cylinders.

Nanotubes are much stronger than metal wires of equal diameter, because the atoms in them are held by stronger chemical bonds than those in metals. Nanotubes can also conduct electricity, as semiconductors. Finally, they can be filled with liquid metal; when the metal solidifies, you have a metal wire the size and strength of a nanotube.

Most projected applications call for using nanotubes as extremely small electrical wires; proof-of-concept experiments have already been performed. Nanotubes have the advantage of "tunable" conductivity and of being many times stronger than metal wires of the same diameter. However, there are also people thinking about how to use nanotubes as structural elements in "molecular tinkertoy" sets because of their mechanical strength.

I don't know what your definition of valuable is, so I can't say whether I think nanotubes will be what you would consider valuable. They're not likely to be as valuable as lasers or semiconductors (other products of pure research), but they may prove as valuable as nuclear magnetic resonance (used for MRI scanners and for most structural determination in organic chemistry, and yet another product of pure research). The major difficulty, as with applications of buckyballs, is that they are pretty expensive to purify enough for usefulness (they're cheap to produce).

Lots and lots of information on nanotubes can be found at Nobel Prizewinner Richard Smalley's home page.

  Dan Berger
  Bluffton College
  http://cs.bluffton.edu/~berger


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