i-Team Carbon Nanotubes for 2010 Lent Term
For the upcoming Lent term I’ll once again be mentoring a group of students doing an i-Teams project. This term we’ll be looking at which applications for carbon nanotubes would benefit most from a production process that slashes the cost of producing nanotubes by an order of magnitude - a production process developed by a group lead by Prof. Derek Fray of the Department of Materials Science at the University of Cambridge
Unlike most current production technologies the new process creates carbon nanotubes from the solid phase - from graphite. This means that production is far more efficient and production capacity is greatly increased.
Prof. Fray’s team has also shown that they can modify the production process to produce carbon nanotubes that are filled with metals such as tin. The use of these filled nanotubes in Li-ion batteries has shown to greatly increase their capacity per unit weight - a very important consideration for future generations of hybrid or all-electric vehicles.