It seems as though carbon nanotube and graphene advances are in the same class as fusion: Commercial applications are just a few years away, and a few years from now, they'll still be a few years away. These articles will promise near-frictionless surfaces hard as diamond with high PV factors and every other desirable physical characteristic you can think of, off the charts; and yet there's no shop to which I can send some aluminum parts, where they can apply a layer of it, even though they've been making these breakthroughs several times a year for over a decade.
Here's another interesting recent development in material sciences -- amorphous magnesium carbonate, which will supposedly be absorbent as all hell.
34 comments:
This is a cheap attempt to use this controversial subject to draw traffic. I'm not going to fall for it.
Nanovaginas!
@William, lol..or that pastafarian was thinking onion rings for lunch.
Chemistry was not my strong suit in HS but I read the post and I have marveled at the materials science revolution in this day and age. Though my experience and comment was more mundane regarding those beautiful planters they are making which are so light but look like terra cota.
That's quite the business plan:
1. Grow concentric hexagons from graphene using chemical vapor deposition
2. ?
3.Profit
Yes, but can they grow a pair of bucky balls?
If I it wont let me see through clothes, meh.
Didn't onion rings kill Tony Soprano?
Yea, I thought we were gonna build a border fence out of nano tubes by now.
What about that space elevator?
My personal flying car was delivered this week, but damn, I've been waiting a long time. Thank you Amazon.
Can't nano tubes allow Meade to perfectly moderate comments? WTF?
Ann has the Bucky balls and only let's him look at them if he behaves.
Those structures are truly amazing. I am currently taking an online course in fundamentals of material science, which is focused mostly on metals, and the advancements in materials (not the fundamentals) are so cool. Cool, and hopefully one day,these structures will be useful as well.
I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Are you listening?
Kardashians.
I fell like going all Samuel L Jackson--
"You're gonna wanna get that mother $%#^ shit on a plane!"
Anyhow--how dare you make me try to dust of my brain--don't know or cannot recall what a damn PV factor is...polyvalent? That can't be it....
Don't make me google it.
Come on one of you lurkers de-cloak and learn me this!
I fell....good one.
I feel like....jeebus Coffee.
--btw I watch the Kardashaians.
ppppffffffftttt.
Ooh just figured out why I can't remember PV factor---and/or type.
Snow Crash creeps closer.
A closer look?
Isn't that how all the trouble started at TOP?
PS Of course, the enviro-nuts will hate it.
Maybe the answer is that these exotic new materials aren't quite as useful, pound for pound over their existing materials equivalent, as the cost of their patents or manufacturing cost? A somewhat similar situation obtains in agriculture, where the Nineties and early Oughts saw a wave of brilliant new GMO traits, which yes, were *better* than their traditional hybrid equivalents, but not better enough to offset the extra tech license fees, or only marginally so.
Still and all, there are usages out there of the fancy new materials of the late Eighties and early Nineties in manufacturing - it's just that materials advances are kind of... low-key. The silent sort of advances which take long enough and are incremental enough that folks don't quite notice it when they appear in the middle-term.
as the cost of their patents or manufacturing cost?
I suspect it's the costs. These "materials" are probably being used. We just don't "know" about it.
Warfare is the incubator or mother of invention.
Chemistry was not my strong suit in HS but I read the post and I have marveled at the materials science revolution in this day and age.
I was listening to part of JFK's speech in which he announced his intention to send men to the Moon by the end of the 1960s. He specifically mentions the use "of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented...." Not sure if that part of the speech ended up being correct or not, but what faith in the scientists and engineers!
1. Grow concentric hexagons from graphene using chemical vapor deposition
2. ?
3.Profit
This business plan may be the most useful intellectual tool created in the last 50 years. One can use it to cut through mountains of bullshit with little muss of fuss.
Didn't onion rings kill Tony Soprano?
And there was everyone trying to figure out which guest was the hitman, when it was the onion rings the whole time!
Kardashians.
And here I was having a perfectly pleasant afternoon taking stuff to Once Upon a Child and cleaning out the garage, and now you've got to go and ruin it for me.
:\
Okay, would someone mind telling me what a "disordered carbonate" is?
I just keep on imagining some grizzled old chem professor saying "OK, if you carbonates over yonder don't behave yerselves I'm gonna come over there & open up a can of reagent grade whoop-ass!"
Thank you!
Damnit!
EL Poillooooooo!!!
Paging El Pollo.
All I could find before I head out is this:
http://www.academia.edu/2201750/Variations_in_Atomic_Disorder_in_Biogenic_Carbonate_Hydroxyapatite_Using_the_Infrared_Spectrum_Grinding_Curve_Method
Ooh just figured out why I can't remember PV factor---and/or type.
Did you mean the Ideal Gas Law: PV=nRT ?
Okay, would someone mind telling me what a "disordered carbonate" is?
In what context? There are lots of carbonates, the most common is calcium carbonate. Disorder implies a lack of crystalline regularity.
@icepick - it was the guy in the Members Only jacket.
Tony should have shot him first just because of that jacket.
Are married researchers in a filing relationship codependent or covalent?
Failing,not filing
Sorry, had to take the little woman out for a night on the town.
By PV, I meant the pressure-velocity number. It's used as a predictor of wear rate. It seems meaningless to talk of the PV of just one material, but they do -- they must mean when it's paired up with some standard or idealized mating surface.
So something with a very high PV, like bronze, will wear for a long time. And most (all?) materials have different PVs for each specific V, velocity, in inches per minute. Some materials do better in high-pressure, low-velocity applications; others do better with the opposite.
Some of these cutting-edge technologies have been brought to market; you can get PVD coatings applied, like carbonitride. You can have diamond-like carbon laid down on a part.
But they're all so expensive that it's generally only applied to tooling, not to production parts. That annoys the shit out of me.
I want to be able to coat a 7075 aluminum part with harder-than-shit, long-wearing, infinitely slick carbon nanotubes, goddammit. And I want to be able to coat such a part 0.75 inches in diameter by 0.75 long, in quantities of 1000 pcs, for, say, $0.50 each.
Right now, the best option is still anodizing, which we've had now for something like 100 years.
Several years ago, I invested several thousand dollars in companies that were supposed to be developing this kind of technology. Some of the stock went to zero before I could unload it. I lost almost all of it eventually.
El Pollo Raylan said...
Ooh just figured out why I can't remember PV factor---and/or type.
Did you mean the Ideal Gas Law: PV=nRT ?
***************
No--thanks EL Pollo--I should have written that more clearly--I was trying to figure out what Pastafarian meant.
By PV, I meant the pressure-velocity number. It's used as a predictor of wear rate. It seems meaningless to talk of the PV of just one material, but they do -- they must mean when it's paired up with some standard or idealized mating surface.
So something with a very high PV, like bronze, will wear for a long time. And most (all?) materials have different PVs for each specific V, velocity, in inches per minute. Some materials do better in high-pressure, low-velocity applications; others do better with the opposite.
Thank you Pasta.
@madawaskan: My fault. I should have manned-up and read pasta's blogpost instead of just the comments.
I feel like such a loser now.
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