Next up is Dr. Martin Lades.\u00a0 Martin is a long-time Space Elevator guy.\u00a0 He was a member of the Kansas City Space Pirates and a founding member of The Internatinal Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC).\u00a0 Martin is a Board Member of ISEC as well as taking care of all of our day-2-day IT issues.\u00a0 I’ve know Martin for several years now and am happy to count him among my friends.\u00a0 His talk is on Project\u00a0CLAVIS, a European\u00a0CNT initiative.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Next is Dr. Boris Yakobsen.\u00a0 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…\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He then discussed trying to understand why carbon nanotubes failed under stress.\u00a0 This was followed by a theoretical discussion of why carbon nanotube growth starts and how does it continue to grow.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He said that someone (Dave Lashmore from Nanocomp?\u00a0 Steve Steiner from MIT?) said “Why does CNT growth stop?\u00a0 We don’t even know why it starts!”\u00a0 I’m not a physicist nor a chemist, so much of what he said was over my head, but the talk was fascinating…<\/p>\n
We then heard from\u00a0Dr. Michael De Volder talking about Tailoring the self-organization of CNT growth.\u00a0 I was introduced to this topic at the Nanotube workshop in Cincinnati from a talk given by John Hart from the University of Michigan.\u00a0 It turns out that Dr. De Volder is collaborating with Dr. Hart and so his subject matter is a bit familiar to me.\u00a0 His talk centered on using capillary forces to create nanotube structures.\u00a0 A nanotube ‘forest’ is mostly empty space.\u00a0 This forest is saturated with a liquid and then the liquid is removed.\u00a0 This causes the nanotubes to form various structures, depending on how they were originally grown.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Lunch…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Next up is Dr. Martin Lades.\u00a0 Martin is a long-time Space Elevator guy.\u00a0 He was a member of the Kansas City Space Pirates and a founding member of The Internatinal Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC).\u00a0 Martin is a Board Member of ISEC as well as taking care of all of our day-2-day IT issues.\u00a0 I’ve know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}