Daily Archives: November 14, 2007

The 2007 Light Racers Competition – Part 5

I have four more videos and two more pictures to post to complete my coverage of the 2007 Light Racers Competition.

The first video is of Spaceward’s Ben Shelef explaining how the Light Racer competition is going to work.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89ZLhRJK0E[/youtube]

.

This second video is one of most of the competitors in this competition.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnIHtTphlxw[/youtube]

.

This third video is of most of the entries into the competition.  You’ll note that they’re sitting in front of a large picture of the surface of the moon, with an earthrise in the distant.  This picture was used as a backdrop for the races.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UMi2r5kdIw[/youtube]

.

The final video is one of Ben announcing the winners / prizes in this year’s competition.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR2HXwSilzE[/youtube]

.

The two pictures are ones of the competitors and entries.  I must confess that I had fairly low expectations for this particular event – I didn’t think that it would be very much fun or generate much interest.  I was wrong on all counts – everyone really enjoyed it and you could see the “family resemblance” to the earlier Space Elevator Games – lots of experienced gained for future competitions.  I think that next year’s event will be an even bigger success!

(Click on the picture thumbnails for larger versions)

More on 20 GPa carbon nanotubes…

More from Dr. Edwards about this development:

It has not been released in print yet because it is coming out in Science next week – just verbal so far. I can’t even get a copy of their presentation until next week.

The details are that they are making threads with 20 GPa but not consistently – 25% of the time or about that. It is also part of a very steady, consistent increase that they have had in their material over the last 4 years. Their process is one where the CNTs are grown in a furnace without a substrate and pulled out on a spool from the bottom.

And the MIT-DeltaX team has this to say about it on their blog:

Recently, Dr. Alan Windle at the University of Cambridge announced the development of 20 GPa yarns derived from nanotubes. These materials are produced from nanotube yarns and contain graphitic hyperfilaments composed of nanotubes, which exhibit strengths comparable to an individual nanotube but over macroscopic length scales.

We have been working on the production of these materials for some time now as well. Independently our team had developed the same processing technique Dr. Windle is using, but with our own twist.  But we are not only producing yarns, but also ribbons. More on this soon…

Exciting times, to be sure.

Incidentally, I’ve updated the link to the DeltaX website on this blog’s sidebar…

04FEB2008 – Correction.  The best fiber strength was measured at 9 GPa, not 20 GPa as I (and others) initially reported.