2010 EuroSpaceward Conference – Saturday morning (2)

Next up is Dr. Martin Lades.  Martin is a long-time Space Elevator guy.  He was a member of the Kansas City Space Pirates and a founding member of The Internatinal Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC).  Martin is a Board Member of ISEC as well as taking care of all of our day-2-day IT issues.  I’ve know Martin for several years now and am happy to count him among my friends.  His talk is on Project CLAVIS, a European CNT initiative.  The CLAVIS objectives are 1) Overcome CNT growth termination, 2) Determine appropriate catalyst selection, 3) Develop techniques for in-situ tracking of CNT growth and 4) Increase growth rate of CNT array to minimize defect formation and amorphous carbon.  This is the first time I’ve heard of this project – I hope that it gets off the ground as the more minds that are working on this problem, the better.

Next is Dr. Boris Yakobsen.  I was able to have dinner with him and a few others last night and participated in a very stimulating discussion about carbon nanotubes, politics, Wikileaks and all the rest…  He opened his presentation by quoting a section of Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise – always ‘red meat’ for a Space Elevator enthusiast.  He then discussed trying to understand why carbon nanotubes failed under stress.  This was followed by a theoretical discussion of why carbon nanotube growth starts and how does it continue to grow.  I am reminded of a comment that Ben Shelef made to me once when he was talking about why nanotube growth stops after a while.  He said that someone (Dave Lashmore from Nanocomp?  Steve Steiner from MIT?) said “Why does CNT growth stop?  We don’t even know why it starts!”  I’m not a physicist nor a chemist, so much of what he said was over my head, but the talk was fascinating…

We then heard from Dr. Michael De Volder talking about Tailoring the self-organization of CNT growth.  I was introduced to this topic at the Nanotube workshop in Cincinnati from a talk given by John Hart from the University of Michigan.  It turns out that Dr. De Volder is collaborating with Dr. Hart and so his subject matter is a bit familiar to me.  His talk centered on using capillary forces to create nanotube structures.  A nanotube ‘forest’ is mostly empty space.  This forest is saturated with a liquid and then the liquid is removed.  This causes the nanotubes to form various structures, depending on how they were originally grown.  According to Dr. De Volder (and Dr. Hart), these structures are much more rigid than the original nanotube forest – this process is called capillary densification.

Lunch…