Carbon Nanotube Wiring Nears Copper-Level Performance
▼ Summary
– Carbon nanotubes were initially seen as a material wonder due to their metallic and semiconducting forms, extreme lightness, and exceptional strength.
– Practical challenges emerged, including difficulty obtaining pure populations of specific forms and producing long nanotubes.
– It was also hard to send many electrons through metallic nanotubes, despite their low resistance to current.
– A recent paper in *Science* describes adding a chemical to nanotube bundles to boost current-carrying capacity closer to copper.
– The more conductive nanotubes were unstable, but the discovery may lead to more durable versions.
When carbon nanotubes first emerged, they were hailed as a near-miraculous material. They came in both metallic and semiconducting varieties, were extraordinarily lightweight, and could only be broken by actually tearing apart their chemical bonds. The potential applications seemed boundless.
But the practical challenges quickly tempered that early enthusiasm. Producing a pure batch of either metallic or semiconducting nanotubes proved extremely difficult. Most synthesis methods yielded a messy tangle of short tubes; those longer than a couple of centimeters remained rare. And although the metallic form offered very low resistance to electric current, getting a substantial flow of electrons through a single nanotube was another matter entirely.
Materials scientists, however, are nothing if not persistent, and they continue to push toward making carbon nanotubes viable for real-world use. In the latest issue of Science, a research team describes a breakthrough: by adding a specific chemical to bundles of carbon nanotubes, they boosted the material’s current-carrying capacity to levels approaching that of copper. The most conductive nanotubes produced in the study were not stable over time, but the work points toward a path for developing wiring that maintains high performance and a longer shelf life.
(Source: Ars Technica)
