Something new to think about.

[Dick Byron]

Galvorn.

[Dwayne Donnelly]

Interesting fabric, insanely expensive and conductive, what would you use it for?

[Curare]

Interesting fabric, insanely expensive and conductive, what would you use it for?

Conductive you say? power lines integrated into wing skins? Now you can have a battery as tip weight!

[Dick Byron]

What I read was they were suppose to use this to replace balsa in wind turbine blades. That will certainly effect all of us.

[Ken Culbertson]

What I read was they were suppose to use this to replace balsa in wind turbine blades. That will certainly effect all of us.

I will get excited when it *IS* used to replace balsa.

Ken

[Dennis Toth]

Maybe Scotty gave them the formula?

[Paul Wescott]

Maybe Scotty gave them the formula?

If this were true they would make the blades and towers out of transparent aluminum so they wouldn’t be such an eyesore.

[Dave Hull]

Here are a couple of thoughts:

On an aerospace project that I worked for ~5 years, we had some very high power/current demands. Huge copper bus bars are really heavy. That's not good in airborne equipment. Special melt aluminum had a bit better specific power transmission: kW per pound. The holy grail was a non-metallic, room temperature superconducting material....

The promise was there with carbon nanotubes. So I tracked their progress and invested in a company effort to aid development ensuring that my project's unique requirements made the list. The issue with carbon nanotubes was that they could only be chained in very small pieces, leaving the problem of how to join them end-to-end and still attain essentially miraculous properties. Visualize it like this: take a big handful of drinking straws in both hands; now jam them together, end-to-end. How many places are there where one tube lines up with the other and therefore achieves good properties? It is random, and percentage-wise it is very poor. However, if you applied a ton of technology and were willing to fiddle at a microscopic level, you can do much, much better. That has been done in a lab.  It will be interesting to see if these companies have a viable commercial process for any type of quantity production, and what percent of the absolute (research level) properties they can actually achieve.

The driving market for this technology was high power electrical lines. Think about it: an exceptionally strong carbon fiber "wire" in tension that is a fraction of the weight (move the towers further apart) and has much lower line losses at even secondary distribution voltages. Holy grail stuff.

The Galvorn mesh might be the latest, best large structures fused so far, but they didn't cite any properties that I could find. It will be interesting to see how this startup/venture goes....

Dave

PS--People laugh about transparent aluminum from Scottie's whale episode. Actually, I worked with a material that was an aluminum compound that had visible frequency transparency. It is not out of the question, rather, it isn't likely it will be pure aluminum. Except for the soda can you are holding, most useful aluminum items are all alloys too.

[doug coursey]

Here are a couple of thoughts:

On an aerospace project that I worked for ~5 years, we had some very high power/current demands. Huge copper bus bars are really heavy. That's not good in airborne equipment. Special melt aluminum had a bit better specific power transmission: kW per pound. The holy grail was a non-metallic, room temperature superconducting material....

The promise was there with carbon nanotubes. So I tracked their progress and invested in a company effort to aid development ensuring that my project's unique requirements made the list. The issue with carbon nanotubes was that they could only be chained in very small pieces, leaving the problem of how to join them end-to-end and still attain essentially miraculous properties. Visualize it like this: take a big handful of drinking straws in both hands; now jam them together, end-to-end. How many places are there where one tube lines up with the other and therefore achieves good properties? It is random, and percentage-wise it is very poor. However, if you applied a ton of technology and were willing to fiddle at a microscopic level, you can do much, much better. That has been done in a lab.  It will be interesting to see if these companies have a viable commercial process for any type of quantity production, and what percent of the absolute (research level) properties they can actually achieve.

The driving market for this technology was high power electrical lines. Think about it: an exceptionally strong carbon fiber "wire" in tension that is a fraction of the weight (move the towers further apart) and has much lower line losses at even secondary distribution voltages. Holy grail stuff.

The Galvorn mesh might be the latest, best large structures fused so far, but they didn't cite any properties that I could find. It will be interesting to see how this startup/venture goes....

Dave

PS--People laugh about transparent aluminum from Scottie's whale episode. Actually, I worked with a material that was an aluminum compound that had visible frequency transparency. It is not out of the question, rather, it isn't likely it will be pure aluminum. Except for the soda can you are holding, most useful aluminum items are all alloys too.

THAT DRIVE THE PRICE OF CARBON SKY HIGH TOO

[Steve Helmick]

THAT DRIVE THE PRICE OF CARBON SKY HIGH TOO

Well sure! That's the way government works. Never worry about the cost consequences or field serviceability, and always use the lowest bidder. Cost overruns and delays are to be expected, so lawyers can get involved. They need to profit from every boondoggle.  Steve

[944_Jim]

If this were true they would make the blades and towers out of transparent aluminum so they wouldn’t be such an eyesore.

No! Poor birds...more poor birds. And poor private pilots. Now how do we convince drones to fly into invisible wind mills?