• Table of Contents • C&EN Classifieds • Today's Headlines • Cover Story • Editor's Page • Business • Government & Policy • Science & Technology • ACS News • Calendars • Books • Career & Employment • Special Reports • Nanotechnology • What's That Stuff?          Back Issues 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998  Safety Letters  Chemcyclopedia ACS Members can sign up to receive C&EN e-mail newsletter.   Join ACS			October 28, 2002 Volume 80, Number 43 CENEAR 80 43 p. 12 ISSN 0009-2347 MATERIALS SCIENCE Dry Spinning Of Carbon Nanotube Yarns RON DAGANI Two years ago, a French team stumbled upon a way to spin carbon nanotubes into fibers from an aqueous/organic slurry (C&EN, Nov. 20, 2000, page 9). Now serendipity has led a Beijing team to discover a "dry" method for spinning continuous carbon nanotube yarns as long as 30 cm [Nature, 419, 801 (2002)]. These yarns might one day be used in bulletproof vests, materials that block electromagnetic waves, and other products. REPRINTED FROM NATURE © 2002 Kaili Jiang, Qunqing Li, and Shoushan Fan of the department of physics and Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center at Tsinghua University used chemical vapor deposition to grow a highly aligned "carpet" of carbon nanotubes several hundred micrometers high on a substrate. When they attempted to pull a bundle of tubes out of the carpet, they instead drew out a yarn. Because the nanotubes have very clean surfaces, they adhere to one another through a strong van der Waals interaction as the nanotubes are pulled out of the carpet, causing self-assembly of a yarn, Fan believes. The researchers showed that when the yarn carries an electrical current in vacuum, it glows like a lightbulb filament (see photo). Following three hours of light emission, the conductivity and tensile strength of the filament increased substantially, perhaps because of "welding" of nanotubes to one another, the researchers suggest. They also showed that a parallel array of yarns can function as a polarization filter for light. Top Chemical & Engineering News Copyright © 2002 American Chemical Society			Related Stories Nanotubes Spun Into Long Fibers [C&EN, Nov. 20, 2000] Nanotechnology [C&EN Archive] E-mail this article to a friend Print this article E-mail the editor
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