They have now managed to producean aerogel out of carbon nanotubes which likely takes the resultant materialclose to the real limits for such materials.
None of this was even imaginednot so long ago.
We are seeing a wide range of newpossibilities emerge and most today are wonderful solution looking for problemsto solve. Something needs to get theapplication work started. Perhaps we canuse this to support structural work in a large airship. It certainly looks able to provide corestrength for stress skin structures. Anair ship skin composed of two monofilaments sandwiching an aerogel and wellbonded is likely to be increditably strong and resilient.
At present this is a labcuriosity. Let us hope we see it elsewhere.
World's lightest solid material, known as 'frozen smoke', gets evenlighter
By Grant Banks
22:48 January 13, 2011
Frozen smoke is the world's lightest solid material
Researchers have created a new aerogel that boasts amazing strength andan incredibly large surface area. Nicknamed ‘frozen smoke’ due to itstranslucent appearance, aerogels are manufactured materials derived from a gelin which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas,resulting in a material renowned as the world’s lightest solid material. Thenew so-called “multiwalled carbon nanotube (MCNT) aerogel” could be used insensors to detect pollutants and toxic substances, chemical reactors, andelectronics components.
Although aerogels have been fabricated from silica, metal oxides,polymers, and carbon-based materials and are already used in thermal insulationin windows and buildings, tennis racquets, sponges to clean up oil spills, andother products, few scientists have succeeded in making aerogels from carbonnanotubes.
The researchers were able to succeed where so many before them hadfailed using a wet gel of well-dispersed pristine MWCNTs. After removing theliquid component from the MWCNT wet gel, they were able to create the lightestever free-standing MWCNT aerogel monolith with a density of 4 mg/cm3.
MWCNT aerogels infused with a plastic material are flexible, like aspring that can be stretched thousands of times, and if the nanotubes in aone-ounce cube were unraveled and placed side-to-side and end-to-end, theywould carpet three football fields. The MWCNT aerogels are also excellentconductors of electricity, which is what makes them ideal for sensingapplications and offers great potential for their use in electronics components.
A report describing the process for making MWCNT aerogels and tests todetermine their properties appears in ACS Nano.
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