What is ten times lighter than steel, yet 500 times stronger, conducts electricity like copper and dissipates heat like brass? The answer is “buckypaper” and it may be coming soon to a product near you. Individual sheets of “buckypaper’ do not look like much, but when sheets are stacked and pressed together as a composite, the positive properties begin to multiply dramatically.

The concept of buckypaper is not new, but new discoveries at Florida State University may be just what is needed to convert the concept into marketable products. Buckypaper falls into the nanotechnology category, since the material is made up of nanotubes, tiny cylinders that are only 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair. Nanotubes exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat.

The research at Florida State does not change the basic technology. Rather, they are developing manufacturing techniques that may allow buckypaper composites to compete favorably with other types of composite materials in use today, such as carbon-fiber composites, best known as exotic materials used in aerospace applications and exotic auto racing. None of the current composite technologies have the range of attributes potentially available from buckypaper composites.

The latest developments in buckypaper are being engineered in the Florida State University High-Performance Materials Institute. The secret of buckypaper-composite strength is a matter of the huge surface are of each tiny nanotube. Institute director Jerry Wang says, “If you take a gram of nanotubes, just one gram, and if you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can cover about two-thirds of a football field.”

So far, the best available composite material is known as IM7. By using magnetism as a way to line up the tubes and increase their collective strength, the Florida State team feels that they can quickly close the gap and bring buckypaper composites to the front of the pack. Jarry Wand says that “By the end of next year we should have a buckypaper composite as strong as IM7, and it’s 35 percent lighter.”

Buckpaper composites could be used to build items as diverse as electrodes for fuel cells, super capacitors and batteries, more efficient and lighter replacements for graphite sheets used in laptop computers to dissipate heat, airplane surfaces, automobiles and even televisions screens. As Wang says, “Our plan is perhaps in the next 12 months we’ll begin maybe to have some commercial products. Nanotubes obviously are no longer just lab wonders. They have real world potential. It’s real.”

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Entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 1:53 pm under Auto, Science and technology, Technology.

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