Honda Makes Nanotube Breakthrough 88
SkinnyGuy writes "Carbon nanofibers and nanotubes are the future of computers, cars, energy and more, but it won't happen until someone figures out how to make carbon nanotubes more efficiently and in formations that can deliver enough energy and functionality to offer practical solutions for real-world problems. Honda's latest breakthrough could be the first step. Of course, Intel is working on similar carbon nanotube fabrication technology. Whoever finally delivers a practical solution, it sounds like a win-win for us."
Seems Wasteful (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Seems Wasteful (Score:5, Interesting)
You consider cheaper, more efficient power transmission, smaller, cheaper, more efficient motors, lighter, cheaper cars, etc. "unintelligent"? Ok, how about more efficient antennas for your cellphones leading to longer battery life? Surely you would consider that a Nobel-grade breakthrough!
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That thought process works to dim the interest of the story, don't you think? Implementation into all of the technology you mentioned would take years. Hence, I'm more excited to hear that they have actually achieved a level of stability with the product, but simply for conductivity seems anti-climactic. I suppose I'm more interested and impressed with Intel's intentions.
Oh, yeah, and let us not forget...lighter and cheaper cars? RECENTLY the cost of a hybrid or electric car is becoming reasonable enough
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What I find funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find funny about all this is that Honda, the biggest, most anti-electric-vehicle automaker out there, may just have given electric vehicles the best gift they could have asked for. Not in terms of batteries, but in terms of nanotube-composite charging cables. Optimal metallic nanotubes have a resistivity a tiny fraction that of copper; they're practically room temperature superconductors, in terms of resistance. And it's directional, too -- the current flows readily down the length of the tubes, but poorly from side to side. I've seen varying numbers, and I think it depends on the types of tubes and their application, but this [electrical...ronics.org] article says that CNTs on microchips can carry 1,000 times the current density of copper and silver. Now, you won't get that extreme level in a composite, but those are still amazing numbers to have as a starting point.
In short, they're perfect for the ideal super-high-power charging cable. Far thinner, lighter, and less cooling needed for a given power output. You could probably have a cable off that monster 800kW charger Aerovironment made for TARDEC be light enough for a six year old to handle.
Obviously, the ultra-high-power chargers still need the typical battery buffer so that they don't strain the grid, but if metallic CNT cables hit the market, there will be some serious current flowing with a much lower charger size and cost. :)
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That was years ago. Both are under different management now. GM is now resurrecting the electric car (at least, plug-in hybrids) and is making a huge push for EVs and EV infrastructure. Honda is taking every opportunity they can to dis EVs in every way imagineable in the press. They're big hydrogen backers. Due to a lack of progress on hydrogen, they finally (after years of refusing to) introduced plans to make an electric vehicle -- but not until 2015 (way behind pretty much everyone else but Audi).
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Re:Seems Wasteful (Score:4, Interesting)
Nanotubes can theoretically carry a current of 1 billion Amps/cm^2 which is over a thousand times the current at which Copper gets fried. THey are also lighter and far stronger than any other conductor we have tested. Upwards of 200x as strong as medium grade steel and 4x less dense. Not even superconductors can carry the amount of power we are talking about here as the magnetic fields created by such a current destroy the superconductivity of all known examples of superconductors well before this amount of current is reached.
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blah.
Wake me up when I can head down to the market and buy a widget made with nanotubes. Because until then, it's all smoke, mirrors, grants, and lab reports.
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You do realise, that the transistor was all smoke, mirrors, grants and lab reports until someone managed to actually make one, right?
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Wake me up when I can head down to the market and buy a widget made with nanotubes.
This is Slashdot ("news for nerds"). The site you seem to be looking for is Consumer Reports [consumerreports.org]. Everything discussed on that site is available for sale now, and they won't bother you with any of that horrible "science stuff".
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I know very well where I am, #14640. I've been reading articles about nanotubes on Slashdot for as long as there has been a Slashdot.
It's simply been long enough that such articles are positively boring. It's like reading about Duke Nukem Forever.
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I know very well where I am, #14640. I've been reading articles about nanotubes on Slashdot for as long as there has been a Slashdot.
Cool... then you are probably aware of Slashdot's ability to let you skip articles you aren't interested in.
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But then I'd miss the grandness of the announcement that nanotubes have, you know, become useful.
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Not even superconductors can carry the amount of power we are talking about here as the magnetic fields created by such a current destroy the superconductivity of all known examples of superconductors well before this amount of current is reached.
Are they more resistive but with a much greater ability to take the heat? How hot and resistive is this super-charged nanotube cable?
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Mr Gingrich, it's time to turn off the computer and take your meds.
win-win (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:win-win (Score:5, Funny)
It's not fat, it's just big boned.
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I believe the PC term is "gravitationally enhanced"
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People should realise that invention is not A to B, but it is a feedback loop! If you make it hard to go from B to C, it's pointless!
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Patents are something that shouldn't exist in the first place!
Without patents, there is a huge incentive to keep all commercializable discoveries and inventions secret, because that's the only way to prevent your competition from selling the product you invented more cheaply than you can (after all, you have to repay all the debts you incurred while inventing/perfecting your invention, and your competitors don't... all they have to do is obtain one unit and then duplicate it).
With patents, you are granted
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Without patents, there is a huge incentive to keep all commercializable discoveries and inventions secret,
It doesn't work that way. The only way to keep it secret is to not sell it; as soon as you sell something, it can be first copied and later reverse-engineered and duplicated. These are the distribution-related problems patents were allegedly created to solve.
In my opinion that's a better result than having the invention remain secret forever.... YMMV.
You are committing the logical fallacy of false dichotomy. Given a choice between making some profit by selling an unpatented product, and no profit by not selling an unpatented product, the choice is fairly clear. Any product not produced because there
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Given a choice between making some profit by selling an unpatented product, and no profit by not selling an unpatented product, the choice is fairly clear.
Or more likely, losing money from R&D funds not being recouped from insufficient sales. Patents are a good idea by creating an incentive to innovate. It's the abuse of the patent system that's stalling creativity, not the system itself.
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This is why the Chinese are helpful to the technological world. If Intel or Honda makes a breakthrough and gets a patant. The Chinese will just copy is and sell it for dirt cheap. So the choice for consumers becomes Cheap and shady or Expensive and "clean" If Intel or Honda charge too much for their patent than cheap and shady will win. Its a ballance of powers.
If a Chinese product infringes on an American patent, importing the product becomes illegal. So then they can sell it to India or Malaysia or whoever doesn't have that patent registered in their system. I don't really find that helpful.
Patents in the US only last about 20 years, but it's usually more expedient and profitable to license such a patent.
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people who own patents have to license them on fair, reasonable and non discriminatory terms. They can't prevent other people from licensing it by charging more than it is worth.
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Nonsense. They'll sell and sell and sell. And profit and profit and profit.
Patents are only for a limited amount of time. The only way to exploit the patent (unless its a defensive patent) is to market it. You market it at the highest price the market will bear and then you reap the profits.
When the patent lapses, then the prices really drop.
Tech like this really is a win win.
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Of course they will. Which will make it more expensive for 20 years, but if the benefits are that great, it'll still be used. Worst case scenario is multiple companies get patents on different parts of the process and can't come to terms; then you have patent deadlock where no one can produce the product.
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A patent can only protect you for so long in industry before someone comes up with some alternative idea that makes yours irrelevant except on purely 'intellectual' value. Researchers are constantly searching for multiple methods of finding some sort of technological solution; for example, there are multiple ways that people are investigating implementing nanoscale semiconductor particles (rods or dots) to enhance quantum efficiency in solid state organic photovoltaics, even though there are other methods t
win-win-win (Score:1)
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I hate to have to tell you this, but there were patents 50 years ago.
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You would rather they didn't do the research?
Moron.
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hey there mister nasty ... i didn't say i'd rather not ... i just have a different definition of "win win" ... :: insert nasty name here ::
That's true.
win verb, won, winâ...ning, noun
1. to finish first in a race, contest, or the like.
2. to succeed by striving or effort: He applied for a scholarship and won.
3. to use the power of hope that new technologies magically materialize after incentives to spend ridiculous amounts of money to R&D that product have been eradicated in order to save the general public from paying a fair licensing fee.
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If you really want to see innovation unhindered, patents should be protected, to the fullest extent of the law. Very few innovations come about because (or at least mainly because) the innovator wants to make the world a better place for future generations. Most innovations come about because someone (either an individual, a government, or a cor
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I'm wondering about this, too.
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hmmm I just did a search on google for the pirate bay and it didn't look like anything was purged to me.... maybe some one was full of crap.
Nanotubes... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nanotubes... (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all that isn't quite true. Nanotubes are now used as the tips of some STMs, bucky paper composites, single nanotube transistors and a few others. THe major hurdle to the widespread use of nanotubes is solely due to their high cost. They are about ~1000$/gram the last time I checked so really they'd need to be pretty special to justify that kind of cost.
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It wasn't quite true, but it was quite funny.
Which do you think the poster was going for, truth or funny?
Re:Nanotubes... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can show me a shipping product with a single nanotube transistor, I'll eat my hat. STM tips are a pretty limited market. I can't find any references to commercial buckypaper composities either.
We actually have a buckyball (C60) ion gun for use with our Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (TOF-SIMS). As far as I know, these ion guns are the only existing commercial use for buckyballs. It isn't exactly a huge market.
Fullerenes have been around for nearly 25 years now. It they had anything more than hype, they'd be commercialized by now. I'm not saying it isn't possible, but none of the press releases I've ever read about fullerenes has lead to anything more than another press release.
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You could say the same about aluminum before development of the Bayer process, or titanium prior to the Kroll process. This could be the equivalent for nanotubes.
But, probably not...
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You could say the same about aluminum before development of the Bayer process, or titanium prior to the Kroll process. This could be the equivalent for nanotubes.
But, probably not...
I don't dispute that at all. When/if someone develops that "Bayer"-type process for nanotubes, they'll make a billion dollars and win a Nobel prize. Until then, fullerenes remain hype.
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I don't know, flight had been around for millions of years before anyone discovered a commercially viable approach suitable for human consumption. The idea of mechanical computation devices was around for a century before it became viable even in military applications. Cotton used to be prohibitively expensive for hundreds of years as well.
Sometimes there is simply a nontrivial step that needs to be worked out before a technology can be exploited at a useful scale.
Not a breakthrough... (Score:1)
The Slashdot summary is the only place that this piece of incremental experimentation is referred to as a breakthrough. I'm getting tired of every little news stores that has anything to do with nano-(fill_in_the_blank) being labeled a breakthrough.
Filtering? (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA speaks of filtering the semiconducting fibers from the conducting ones as if this might be a big deal. I would have thought that magnetic separation would be the obvious solution. Am I missing something?
The physical behavior of a conductor moving with respect to a magnetic field is so dramatically different than that of a non-conductor that I have to believe that a semiconductor would behave differently also.
My favorite demo of this effect is to drop a strong magnet through a section of aluminum conduit. The magnet falls normally when released next to but outside the pipe, but a strong magnet can take up to five minutes to fall through the inside. A cow magnet [wikipedia.org]in a half inch pipe is particularly effective.
I can see it now... (Score:1)
A perfect solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets imagine for a second a future where our 'pollution' is the base building material for the majority of products constructed.
Carbon nanotubes/fibers could be the perfect sequestering medium/method for all the CO2 in the atmosphere. They have already shown to be such a useful product, we are continually finding new ways to make use of them. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that only iron has proven to be as diverse.
If mass-production ever takes off I suggest we proclaim this to be the birth of the Carbon age.
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Until someone notices that it has the same effect on the lungs as asbestos. Just some orders of magnitude stronger, because it can enter the blood and cells. :P
(Ok, "until" as in "20 years, millions of deaths and billions of dollars for officials later".)
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Wood is made of carbon removed from the air (Score:2)
Assuming we replant, isn't this the case now with products that come from trees?
finally! (Score:2)
Unobtanium. It's about damned time!
Just how many uses of carbon nanotubes are there?? (Score:2)
It seems like every news announcement out there about material science advances involves carbon nanotubes. Is there anything they can't do???
Possible uses :
1. As an ideal semiconductor
2. As an ideal, super-lightweight conductor
3. As a drug delivery device
4. As an antibiotic
5. As a super strong space elevator cable
6. As the tip of an SEM
7. In electrically conductive clothing
8. As a super-strong super armor
9. Part of a super capacitor
10. Part of a super fast charging lithium ion battery
11. Part of
Did I follow the right link? (Score:1)
it sounds like a win-win for us (Score:1)
In 20 years when the patents expire, perhaps.
Ultracapacitors (Score:2, Interesting)
Are?? (Score:2)
Correctly it is:
Carbon nanofibers and nanotubes could be the future of computers, cars, energy and more,
Because we do not know if we can actually solve the problems that stop us from preferring to use them until now.
Simple logic. Apparently the opposite of what simple minds use. :/
Let's go to the south pacific. I have a earthquake to provoke, and a door to open. :P
Almost win-win (Score:2)
"Whoever finally delivers a practical solution, it sounds like a win-win for us"
Not unless these patents expire and IP rights become public domain.... Then its a win-win
I explained my view of this to my uncle (Score:1)
Do not inhale (Score:1)
Is there a 'peer reviewed' medical consensus on the health effects yet? I mean, there's that scene where hostile nano-bots are being turned into 'dead toner' in Diamond Age, but forget hostile nano-bots... what about just plain nano-dust in your lungs?
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Is there a 'peer reviewed' medical consensus on the health effects yet?
No, there isn't. I wrote a mini document review on in vivo and in vitro effect of fullerenes and nanotuves, and while nanotubes do exhibit cytotoxic activity, the concentrations involved seem un-realistic, but all the experiments were very short term. In vitro experiments seem more conclusive (nanotubes == bad), but that does not necessarily imply that in real life, nanotubes would meaningfully reach the cells to the same extent as in the experiment.
Besides, there is another problem: scientists involved wit