Originally Posted by CrazedMathematician
(I'm not a material engineer so I apologize if any part of this post is idiotic.)
The main problem with carbon nanotubes is the difficulty with growing them long enough to be of any use. After doing some research, I found a site about carbon nanotube rings. So it got me thinking, why not, instead of trying to grow them long and interweaving them, form rings out of them and interlock the rings together. This would make sort of like a nanotube chainmail, with each nanotube ring being interlocked with many other rings. Here is the site about rings:
http://www.research.ibm.com/nanoscience/rings.html
And they also have this interesting pdf. If you look in Figure 1e you can see two interlocking nanotube rings, so interlocking them is possible.
http://www.research.ibm.com/nanoscie...rtel_Rings.pdf
If this could work, then they wouldn't need to be made nearly as long, and one would think you would still get much of the mechanical strength because you have to break the bonds between the carbon atoms (which is the strong part) to pull the rings apart. What do you guys think?
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I saw an instance of a material claimed to have truely outrageous strength properties because of interlocking rings that I wonder if anyone had heard of:
Hanging Tough.
"Perfect diamond is a another real material, but there is a theoretical
material which is far stronger. It, too, uses carbon, but in the form
of benzine-like rings. These are looped through each other in a
three-dimensional matrix, and the impressive figures (1.0 X 10^15
(that's a 1 followed by 15 zeroes), 9.3 X 10^14, and 9.3 X 10^12
N/cm^2) for the yield strengths come from the fact that not only is
deformation resisted by the normal molecular bonds, but by the mutual
repulsion of the shared electron clouds around the rings. As you can
imagine, this also makes the material extremely rigid. And hard. (My
thanks to Dr. John Brantley for telling me about this.)"
http://www.dcr.net/~stickmak/JOHT/joht10strength.htm
*He's giving these in strength numbers in N/cm^2 remember; so in pascals you would multiply these by 10,000. Then this material is claimed to have a strength in tension and compression of 10 billion gigapascals! The largest quoted strength I've seen for carbon nanotubes is 160 gigapascals.
*I wonder if he made a mistake and the numbers he was given for this
material were actually already in pascals, N/m^2. Even then that would
mean a strength of 1 million gigapascals.
*To put this is in perspective such a material could be used to build
both a space elevator and space tower to geosynchronous orbit WITH NO
TAPER. (Actually they might even be enough to strech to Mars!)
* *Bob Clark