John_Stone Report This Comment Date: October 26, 2005 09:54AM
*Stronger Than Steel, Harder Than Diamonds*
Working with a material 10 times lighter than steel - but 250 times stronger -
would be a dream come true for any engineer. If this material also had amazing
properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity, it would
start to sound like something out of a science fiction novel.
Buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes - amazingly strong fibers about
1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair that were first developed in the early
1990s. Buckypaper owes its name to Buckminsterfullerene, or Carbon 60 - a type
of carbon molecule whose powerful atomic bonds make it twice as hard as a
diamond.
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