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The development of new materials and manufacturing processes has been transformative throughout history
We do a lot of work with unique molecules called carbon nanotubes
This is a model of a carbon nanotube
It's about six inches in diameter but if it were the real size it would be
only a few nanometers in diameter That's maybe one ten thousandth the
diameter of a human hair
So nanotubes are extremely small but they're also extremely strong and stiff
and have high electoral conductivity and thermal conductivity
One of our projects working with carbon nanotubes is to build materials with new combinations of properties
Traditionally, if you, you know
pick a material off the shelf or out of the catalog, like a steel or wood or
plastic, it has properties that are determined by what the material is made of
Now using the nano technology and using the manufacturing processes we're
developing, we can seek to combine properties by design
So using carbon nanotubes and building them into complex 3-dimensional structures
These are some models of 3-D structures of nanotubes that we are manufacturing in the lab today
We can create, for example, materials with very high stiffness
and very high damping
And damping is the ability of the material to absorb energy
or it's a measure of loss
And in traditional materials like steel and plastics
you either have high stiffness or high damping, but you don't have both
And so by using these novel nano-structures we can create materials with these combinations of properties
and there are other analogies like creating materials that are very strong
and stiff, but also very lightweight which have great applications in new
aircraft and automotive structures
and also materials with those attractive mechanical properties and, for example,
the ability to store chemical/electrochemical energy
So one of the applications of these new manufacturing processes for
nano-structured materials is to essentially create materials by design
just you... as you would
put ingredients together to make a recipe that you want to have for dinner
think of now choosing the properties that you want to have in your material
and that opens up almost infinite possibilities in making basically
everything around us from new materials out of nano-structures
And another aspect of these processes is that if you build materials essentially from the bottom up
from micro- and nano-structures bit by bit
you can build materials in a very energy-efficient fashion
so you don't need as much energy for the manufacturing process, you don't have as
much waste so there are also very important positive implications on
environmental efficiency
So although you might think that the material is only a small part of the overall system
the material is often what makes the novel performance happen
It is the key ingredient to a lot of new kinds of functionalities.