Ray Baughman and his colleagues have produced a carbon nanotube formulation that’s stronger than steel, as light as air, and more flexible than rubber — a 21st-century muscle:
It could be used to make artificial limbs, “smart” skins, shape-changing structures, ultra-strong robots and — in the immediate future — highly-efficient solar cells.“We can generate about 30 times the force per unit area of natural muscle,” said Baughman, director of the NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Carbon nanotubes have fascinated material scientists since the early 1990s, when researchers started to explore the ultra-light, ultra-strong cylindrical molecules. Though bulk manufacturing difficulties have slowed the development of commercial applications, carbon nanotubes are already used in bicycle components, and in prototypes of airplanes, bulletproof clothing, transistors, and ropes that might someday be used to tether a space elevator. (On a historical note, carbon nanotube-infused steel was used to made Damascus blades, renowned as history’s sharpest swords, though the technique has been lost.)
Baughman became interested in carbon nanotubes while designing artificial muscles from energy-conducting polymers. He figured he could do the job better with linked carbon nanotubes. First he made haphazard tangles of fibers activated by charged liquids. Then he experimented with more structurally-consistent configurations, and other methods of delivering the charge.
His latest muscle, described Thursday in Science, is made from bundles of vertically aligned nanotubes that respond directly to electricity. Lengthwise, the muscle can expand and contract with tremendous speed; from side-to-side, it’s super-stiff. Its possibilities may only be limited by the imaginations of engineers.
I suspect there’s a misunderstanding here:
Natural muscles, said Baughman, contract at a maximum rate of 10 percent per second. In the same amount of time, his latest nanotube sheaths can contract by 40,000 percent.
I suspect it contracts 4,000 times as rapidly as natural muscles, not that it contracts by more than 100 percent in one second — or ever.
The original article includes some embedded videos — but none of them involve Lee Majors jumping over a fence in slow motion.