Old Plastic Bags to Carbon Nnanotubes

This is a great breakthrough. It is a potentially cheap way to produce carbon nano tubes that can be easily scaled up. Thus the commercial promise of this material is today far closer.

Just producing cordage and sheets with binders will throw open ample design ideas and application. And let us not forget high performance bearings that work with a grapheme lubricant. My point is that imagination runs wild the instant this product becomes a simple commodity deliverable.

So bravo for a job well done. It has been a long wait.

Researchers vaporize old plastic bags to create carbon nanotubes

By Ryan Whitwam Sep. 26, 2013

http://www.geek.com/science/researchers-vaporize-old-plastic-bags-to-create-carbon-nanotubes-1572017/

Carbon nanotubes have an incredible number of potential uses, but one of the main barriers to actually implementing this revolutionary nanomaterial is the cost. A team of researchers out of the University of Adelaide might have found a way to make nanotubes that is not only inexpensive, but does away with a troublesome bit of human refuse. According to the new paper, it may be possible to manufacture carbon nanotubes out of plastic bags. The phrase “killing two birds with one stone” comes to mind.

A carbon nanotube is so named because it is simply a microscopic hollow tube made from a single-atom layer of carbon. Researchers first created carbon nanotubes using ethanol as the starting material, and this is still one of the most common approaches. However, this process is slow and still relatively expensive. To make carbon nanotubes you really just need a source of carbon, and there’s plenty of it out there — especially in disposable plastics.

Researchers first succeeded in turning plastic bags into carbon nanotubes back in 2009, but the process was complicated and produced significant toxic byproducts. It involved adding catalytic compounds to a furnace that vaporized the plastic bags, but even the production of valuable carbon nanotubes couldn’t make that system viable. The new process is essentially a different take on the catalytic oven. Old plastic bags are vaporized like before, but a sheet of specially designed template material is added instead of messy chemicals.

The template is a remarkable nanomaterial in its own right. It’s covered by tiny nano-pores that collect the free carbon atoms as the bags disintegrate. The pores guide the carbon atoms to bind together as nanotubes, which can then be harvested from the membrane.

This process has the potential to lower the cost of nanotube production dramatically. After all, there is no shortage of plastic bags floating around in the world. The University of Adelaide team is working to refine the technology, but it seems like a win-win right now.