NASA grant awarded for nanotube research
Rice’s Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory recently received a grant for a project that could help send humans to Mars.
NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate has granted the CNL an $11 million, four-year contract to help develop conductive cables composed entirely of nanotubes.
Howard Schmidt, the executive director of the CNL, said the project is the laboratory’s largest.
‘While the CNL has had about a dozen projects, none have been of this caliber,’ Schmidt said. ‘The NASA contract brings the CNL to the center of research and development.’
The goal of the project is to provide a feasible way to conduct electricity for the next generation of spaceships, Schmidt said.
The new spaceships will need 10 times more power than today’s models, and using current technology to achieve this power would make the power distribution system 25 percent of the spaceship’s weight, as compared to 7 percent in current spaceships.
But quantum wire, the conducting cable CNL plans to develop, will conduct electricity 10 times more efficiently than copper at one-sixth the weight, Schmidt said.
The contract calls for the CNL to provide NASA a one-meter prototype of quantum wire by 2009. Duke University, the University of Pennsylvania, Houston-based Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc., as well as NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Glenn Research Center will work with Rice on the project.
Schmidt said the team’s goal is to find a way to make pure metallic nanotubes and process them into fibers, wires and cables.
The majority of the research will be conducted by graduate students, post-doctorates and staff scientists, but undergraduates will also contribute to the research.
Jones College sophomore Dorothy Koveal said she and Baker College junior Michelle Afkhami are working to find a simple and cost-effective way to grow single-walled nanotubes.
‘The work we do is so straightforward that it is easy to lose track of how important the results are,’ Koveal said. ‘Simply put, we hook a catalyst onto the end of a nanotube and try to grow it out.’
Baker College junior Erica Flor said she and Martel College freshman Kunal Shah are working to find a way to cut nanotubes.
‘We hope to accomplish this by using a strong oxidizing solution that will exploit damage sites in the tube and cut a circle around its circumference,’ Flor said.
Schmidt said long-term advances, such as using nanotubes for long-distance power distribution, could stem from the CNL’s research.
‘As fossil fuels become sparse, we will have to switch to other sources of energy whose sources will be [different] from energy sources today,’ he said. ‘Nanotubes will provide an efficient way to transport that energy.’
The CNL was founded in 1999 as part of the Rice Quantum Institute.
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