
Reconfigured Tesla coil aligns, electrifies materials from a distance - juiced
http://news.rice.edu/2016/04/14/nanotubes-assemble-rice-introduces-teslaphoresis-2/
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Sanddancer
The same lab does a lot of things with nanotubes. One of the videos linked to
at the end of the embedded one shows the work they're doing with spinning
carbon nanotube threads. Some fascinating progress with making lightweight
durable materials there.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XDJC64tDR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XDJC64tDR0)

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fudged71
Isn't this the long sought-after material necessary for a space elevator to
exist?

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adrianN
It depends on the length of the individual tubes. Single tubes have awesome
tensile strength, but a fiber made up of many tubes probably is a lot weaker
because they only stick together via weak forces like van der Waals.

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Rhapso
Looks like:

magnetic field applies forces on a substance, such that that substance forms
into a conductor that further propagates the effect.

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Elrac
If I'm reading it correctly, it's an electric rather than a magnetic field,
but yeah.

I don't see why they emphasize Tesla coils so much. What matters is the
strength and direction of the electric field, not the device used to generate
it. I wouldn't be surprised if you could achieve the same effect with a
(electrostatic) Van der Graaf generator.

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fzzzy
You probably could produce the same effect with a Van der Graaf, but a Tesla
coil produces a pulsating e field, while a Van der Graff produces a static e
field, so there is a possibility of some difference. It would be very
interesting to do the experiment with both and see.

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dkbrk
For those who don't have access, say through an academic institution, you can
get the pdf for this (or any) article through sci-hub.io (though this is a
violation of copyright).

The most important thing that isn't immediately apparent from reading the news
article, is that this process doesn't appear to be creating carbon nanotubes
~15cm long from shorter nanotubes; it is creating nanotube _wires_.

These wires a ~0.15mm in diameter and made up of much shorter individual
single-walled carbon nanotubes that are held together by various
intermolecular forces.

It is _possible_ that the self-assembly process aligns individual nanotubes
end-to-end and fuses them together. The paper doesn't shed much light on this.
The scanning electron microscope images that show a rather lumpy surface on
the wire, which suggests there's a lot of agglomeration going on. At the end
of the paper it was described how a laser was used to quantify the alignment
of nanotubes in the wire: 64% of nanotubes were aligned within 20 degrees of
the teslaphoretic field. It's possible that nanotubes were better aligned in
the process of self-assembly but collapsed into a less organised state and got
clumped together.

Carbon nanotubes are remarkable in a number of ways, but I think probably the
most impressive is their physical properties (which weren't examined in this
paper). The tensile strength of a single walled carbon nanotube is on the
order of ~100GPa; steel is about ~2GPa, and 5GPa is considered exceptionally
strong. These sort of aggregate bundles of carbon nanotubes, however, have
strength on the order of 1-4GPa [1], so nothing extraordinary, relatively
speaking.

If we could manufacture carbon nanotubes in bulk at an arbitrary length, it
would open up some truly extraordinary engineering applications. The proposal
for a space elevator probably isn't practical, but imagine how much stronger
than a carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer a carbon-nanotube-reinforced polymer
would be.

I have a suspicion that it might be possible to use a modification of this
process to grow _really_ long carbon nanotubes. If the RF signal from the
tesla coil aligns individual nanotubes end-to-end, then perhaps they can be
annealed together. Or fused together by chemical vapour deposition. Or perhaps
the nanotubes will spontaneously fuse under the high voltages. Or maybe if
carbon nanotubes were directly grown in a CVD reactor in this sort of RF
signal it could produce a continuous yarn of unbroken nanotubes.

Anyway, this is some really cool and innovative research and I look forward to
seeing where it leads in the future.

[1]: Beese, Allison M., et al. "Key factors limiting carbon nanotube yarn
strength: exploring processing-structure-property relationships." ACS nano
8.11 (2014): 11454-11466.

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aexaey
Isn't this just plain old electrophoresis? [1]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrophoresis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrophoresis)

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kyberias
From the title I thought that someone has modified a Tesla model whatever and
it starts to give electric shocks to people over a distance.

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limaoscarjuliet
This feels like no news. CFL lights come on in electromagnetic field? Known
phenomenon and can be observed under high voltage transmission lines easily.
Also, I have been "building" lines from metal shavings with a magnet 30 years
ago. So what's new?

With this narration style feels almost like Onion story.

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2xj
Wouldn't the tesla coil light the LEDs even without the wires being connected?

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avn2109
If we add "blockchain" to this headline it will be the perfect storm of tech
hype.

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mindcrime
Nah, the word "deep" also needs to be in there somewhere!

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exabrial
And Node

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JamesBlair
Using node.js, telsa coils regulate an internal blockchain economy by forming
self-assembling carbon nanotube based deep learning networks, breakthrough for
self driving flying cars powered by hybrid thorium/solar roadways.

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Vivtek
"..., says Elon Musk."

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voidz
'..secretly!'

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ams6110
N.B. This story has nothing to do with Elon Musk's company.

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elcritch
It's pretty much the beginning to that new terminator movie. Dang I thought it
was a crazy plot twist but now it makes sense -- the upgraded John Conner was
just a walking tesla coil!

