This is likely the biggest technological breakthrough of the year, arguably even of the decade.

A team of researcher from the University of Texas, Dallas, and Australia’s CSIRO has come up with a way to make strong, stable macroscale sheets and ribbons of multiwall nanotubes at a rate of seven meters per minute. Complete with video.

These ribbons and sheets, moreover, already display — without optimization of the process — important electronic and physical properties, making them suitable for use in an enormous variety of settings, including artificial muscles, transparent antennas, video displays and solar cells — and many, many more. The breakthrough was announced in the latest edition of Science. As usual, the article itself is behind a subscriber-only wall, but the abstract and supplementary information are available with a free site registration. The press release from UTD (carried by Eurekalert) provides abundant information, however; an article in the UK Guardian gives additional detail.



If you’ve followed the developments of macro-scale materials made with nanotubes, you’ll understand just how enormous a development this is. Previous “sheets” were small and took hours to produce via a liquid-assembly process. This technique allows a meter-long, five centimeter-wide ribbon to be created in seconds. The Science supplemental material page has a link to a video of this in action — the image above right is a screencap from that video — and the speed at which the carbon nanotube ribbon is produced is just amazing.



But as startling as the production speed is, it pales in comparison to the material’s properties. To start with, the measured gravimetric strength of the nanoribbons — again, this is the unoptimized version — already exceeds steel and carbon fiber materials such as Kevlar.



More here.

Very cool video here.