FSU Nanotube prototypes

http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2017/11/19/fsu-researchers-show-off-nanotube-prototypes/874770001/

It’s stronger than steel, yet only a fraction of its weight. Its size is 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. These are carbon nanotubes.

For more than a decade, Florida State University High-Performance Materials Institute researchers have been laying the groundwork for a number of prototypes involving carbon nanotubes, a key entity in the future of materials engineering.

The institute was founded in 2006 with a mission to recruit and retain top-quality faculty and staff that will place HPMI at the forefront in the field of advanced composites materials and nanomaterials.

“The HPMI is a great resource to the College of Engineering – here many of our leading materials faculty are pushing the state-of-the-art for manufacturing of nanomaterials, and many of our graduate and undergraduate students receive a cutting-edge materials education,” said Dean of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Murray Gibson. “I am particularly excited by the range of research from basic to applied engineering, and the multiplicity of research sponsors from government to industry.”

 

HPMI is located in FSU’s $20 million, 45,000 square foot Materials Research Building in Innovation Park next to the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, where it houses the latest state-of-the-art facilities and laboratories for research in nanomaterials and equipment.

The ground-floor laboratory looks more like a modern manufacturing factory, and includes 3D printers, multiple hot-press machines, furnaces reaching temperatures up to 1,400 degrees Celsius as well as carbonization furnaces up to 2,500 degrees Celsius, large autoclave for high-pressure process and high-pressure waterjet cutters.

Some of HPMI’s innovative technologies include fabrication of buckypapers, stretching alignment of nanotubes and production of nanocomposites.

Buckypaper, a nanotube-based substance, is one of HPMI’s most highlighted prototypes. Though it doesn’t look much different from a regular sheet of carbon paper, it exhibits remarkable properties of strength and conductivity. Although still in the prototypical stage, when the ultrathin buckypaper is used in composites, the nanotubes are poised to transform aerospace defense, energy, infrastructure and transportation.

 

HPMI researchers are focused on scaling up their productive prototypes so that buckypaper can be mass produced and affordable in the future. Planes, trains, and automobiles could one day be composed of this new material, which would revolutionize manufacturing as well as the passengers’ experiences. Commercial and military vehicles may be up to 10 times lighter in the future if they were engineered with buckypaper instead of metal, making them less dangerous and more effective.

“When we explore the development of buckypaper manufacturing process, we also keep the scalability as the ultimate goal to meet quality, quantity and affordability for potential industrial applications,” said HPMI Director Richard Liang. “We also provide continuous samples to support many industrial and government efforts for using carbon nanotubes for new product prototypes.”

HPMI and the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering have recently kicked off a project with NASA that is focused on developing material entities to be used in space travel. The project is a part of a five-year plan by NASA to establish the first-ever Space Technology Research Institutes, which includes one on bioengineering and one on materials synthesis.

Liang was named the materials synthesis team leader and deputy director for the multi-university project.

 

 

“A key element of HPMI’s success has been the quality of the students it attracts both at the graduate and undergraduate level,” Liang said.

HPMI welcomes FSU undergraduates interested in conducting materials research and offers a wide variety of projects for students to engage in. There are currently 60 student researchers at the institute, 16 of which are undergraduates.

Students have gone on to work at companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Electric and Apple.