Nanotube processing
14 Sep 2005
Researchers from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology have now discovered a method to persuade nanotubes to arrange themselves in order of length, which should make processing them much easier.
Nanotubes - minute carbon cylinders - are relatively easy to make, but very difficult to process. This is because they tend to tangle, and it’s extremely difficult to persuade them to untangle. This has been a major bar to investigating whether nanotubes’ great strength could be exploited in composite materials, for example.
Researchers from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology have now discovered a method to persuade nanotubes to arrange themselves in order of length, which should make processing them much easier.
In an article in the journal Polymer Review Letters, research leader Erik Hobble and colleagues explain how suspending the nanotubes in a viscous fluid such as a molten polymer, and subjecting them to what Hobble describes as ‘modest flow conditions’, causes the shorter nanotubes to flow to the walls of the mixer while the larger ones remain in the middle. The factors which influence this self-arrangement are not yet clear, Hobble says.
