Nanotube Purfication Breakthrough

Carbon nanotubes are extremely strong and lightweight. Certain types can transport electrons “ballistically” the way that fiber optics can transmit photons. However this technology is far off in the future. New breakthroughs make this a very promising field. This is one of those breakthroughs.

Researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have added water to the standard method of manufacturing carbon nanotubes to produce tall, dense, vertically-aligned stands of pure nanotubes. The researchers’ demonstrations have yielded stands of single-wall carbon nanotubes as tall as 2.5 millimeters and 99.98 percent pure. Individual nanotubes range from one to three nanometers in diameter.

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