Reconfigured Tesla coil aligns, electrifies materials from a distance | Hacker News Reader

Reconfigured Tesla coil aligns, electrifies materials from a distance

news.rice.edu

127 pointsjuiced29 comments

The same lab does a lot of things with nanotubes. One of the videos linked to at the end of the embedded one shows the work they're doing with spinning carbon nanotube threads. Some fascinating progress with making lightweight durable materials there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XDJC64tDR0

Isn't this the long sought-after material necessary for a space elevator to exist?

It depends on the length of the individual tubes. Single tubes have awesome tensile strength, but a fiber made up of many tubes probably is a lot weaker because they only stick together via weak forces like van der Waals.

It's not that cool. For starters the nanotubes are supplied beforehand, this is just using an electric field to position them. Secondly, the tubes are not necessarily bound or fused together at the end of the process. I think they go back to bring a powder.

Indeed, and two of the 1996 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl, performed their initial work on fullerenes at Rice [1]. The university has a rich history working with nanotubes and other fullerenes.

1. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1...

Looks like:

magnetic field applies forces on a substance, such that that substance forms into a conductor that further propagates the effect.

They create an environment where the nanotube is the lower energy state.

If I'm reading it correctly, it's an electric rather than a magnetic field, but yeah.

I don't see why they emphasize Tesla coils so much. What matters is the strength and direction of the electric field, not the device used to generate it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could achieve the same effect with a (electrostatic) Van der Graaf generator.

You probably could produce the same effect with a Van der Graaf, but a Tesla coil produces a pulsating e field, while a Van der Graff produces a static e field, so there is a possibility of some difference. It would be very interesting to do the experiment with both and see.

For those who don't have access, say through an academic institution, you can get the pdf for this (or any) article through sci-hub.io (though this is a violation of copyright).

The most important thing that isn't immediately apparent from reading the news article, is that this process doesn't appear to be creating carbon nanotubes ~15cm long from shorter nanotubes; it is creating nanotube wires.

These wires a ~0.15mm in diameter and made up of much shorter individual single-walled carbon nanotubes that are held together by various intermolecular forces.

It is possible that the self-assembly process aligns individual nanotubes end-to-end and fuses them together. The paper doesn't shed much light on this. The scanning electron microscope images that show a rather lumpy surface on the wire, which suggests there's a lot of agglomeration going on. At the end of the paper it was described how a laser was used to quantify the alignment of nanotubes in the wire: 64% of nanotubes were aligned within 20 degrees of the teslaphoretic field. It's possible that nanotubes were better aligned in the process of self-assembly but collapsed into a less organised state and got clumped together.

Carbon nanotubes are remarkable in a number of ways, but I think probably the most impressive is their physical properties (which weren't examined in this paper). The tensile strength of a single walled carbon nanotube is on the order of ~100GPa; steel is about ~2GPa, and 5GPa is considered exceptionally strong. These sort of aggregate bundles of carbon nanotubes, however, have strength on the order of 1-4GPa [1], so nothing extraordinary, relatively speaking.

If we could manufacture carbon nanotubes in bulk at an arbitrary length, it would open up some truly extraordinary engineering applications. The proposal for a space elevator probably isn't practical, but imagine how much stronger than a carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer a carbon-nanotube-reinforced polymer would be.

I have a suspicion that it might be possible to use a modification of this process to grow really long carbon nanotubes. If the RF signal from the tesla coil aligns individual nanotubes end-to-end, then perhaps they can be annealed together. Or fused together by chemical vapour deposition. Or perhaps the nanotubes will spontaneously fuse under the high voltages. Or maybe if carbon nanotubes were directly grown in a CVD reactor in this sort of RF signal it could produce a continuous yarn of unbroken nanotubes.

Anyway, this is some really cool and innovative research and I look forward to seeing where it leads in the future.

[1]: Beese, Allison M., et al. "Key factors limiting carbon nanotube yarn strength: exploring processing-structure-property relationships." ACS nano 8.11 (2014): 11454-11466.

Isn't this just plain old electrophoresis? [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrophoresis

From the title I thought that someone has modified a Tesla model whatever and it starts to give electric shocks to people over a distance.

This feels like no news. CFL lights come on in electromagnetic field? Known phenomenon and can be observed under high voltage transmission lines easily. Also, I have been "building" lines from metal shavings with a magnet 30 years ago. So what's new?

With this narration style feels almost like Onion story.

Wouldn't the tesla coil light the LEDs even without the wires being connected?

If we add "blockchain" to this headline it will be the perfect storm of tech hype.

that made me laugh!

Nah, the word "deep" also needs to be in there somewhere!

And Node

Using node.js, telsa coils regulate an internal blockchain economy by forming self-assembling carbon nanotube based deep learning networks, breakthrough for self driving flying cars powered by hybrid thorium/solar roadways.

You forgot MongoDB. MongoDB is webscale.

This sounds like it came from a Markov chain with HN headlines as the corpus.

Reads like a markov chain HN headline generator

"..., says Elon Musk."

'..secretly!'

... in Go.

"A DeepChain node"... Voilà!

To be fair, however you slice it this is one cool story that just lends itself to buzzwords and hype.

N.B. This story has nothing to do with Elon Musk's company.

It's pretty much the beginning to that new terminator movie. Dang I thought it was a crazy plot twist but now it makes sense -- the upgraded John Conner was just a walking tesla coil!

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