“The most valuable material ever sold”
Carbon nanotubes are super-materials that can be stronger than steel and more conductive than copper. So despite much research, why aren’t they used in applications ranging from batteries to tires?
Answer: The high manufacturing costs and extremely expensive price, according to the researchers.
The researchers have demonstrated a new process for creating carbon-nanotube-based material, using carbon dioxide as a feedstock input source.
They achieved the smallest-diameter and most valuable CNTs ever reported in the literature for this approach.
They used sustainable electrochemical synthesis.
A spinoff, SkyNano LLC, is now doing this with far less cost and energy input than conventional methods for making these materials. “That means as market prices start to change, our technology will survive and the more expensive technologies will get shaken out of the market,” said Pint. “We’re aggressively working toward scaling this process up in a big way.”
There are implications for reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.****
The good news:
High-quality carbon nanotubes at a low cost.
Carbon Nanotubes have a huge variety of potential applications for energy, medicine, industry, consumer devices. https://bit.ly/2GRLALW
And we’re only just beginning to figure out what they’re good for. Make them widely available at a low cost and there’s no telling what people will figure out to do with them.
More Good News:
In this process, the carbon comes straight from CO2 in the atmosphere. A “gold rush” for CO2 would have the geoengineering benefit of reducing atmospheric carbon. A self-funded way to mitigate climate change?
Potential Downside:
What if the gold rush goes on and sucks too much CO2 out of the atmosphere. Could it trigger an ice age?
WT 444-757
Eternity Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Image from Pixabay.com
