NASA awards Rice $11M for nanotube research

NASA awards Rice $11M for nanotube research

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

NASA this week awarded Rice University’s Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory (CNL) a four-year, $11 million contract to produce a prototype power cable made entirely of carbon nanotubes. The project aims to pioneer methods of producing pure nanotube power cables, known as “quantum wires,” which may conduct electricity up to 10 times better than copper and weigh about one-sixth as much.

“Technology advances like these are exactly what will be needed to realize the future of space exploration,” said Jefferson D. Howell Jr., director of NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). “We are extremely fortunate to be able to pool the unique expertise available at JSC, Rice and the other collaborators in this effort.”

The contract was awarded by NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate’s Vision for Space Exploration program. It also calls for an additional $4 million in related research at JSC, where researchers will conduct crucial work in the area of nanotube growth, and NASA’s Glenn Research Center, where nanotube composites will be developed for fuel cell components. Rice’s portion of the funding includes support for collaborative projects at Houston-based Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. (CNI), which specializes in large-scale nanotube production; GHG Corp.; Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania.

“In the space shuttle, the primary power distribution system accounts for almost 7 percent of the craft’s weight,” said CNL Director Richard Smalley, the project’s lead investigator. “To support additional instrumentation and broadband communications, NASA’s next generation of human and robotic spacecraft will need far more power. For ships assembled in orbit ­— the most likely possibility — a copper power distribution system could wind up accounting for one-quarter the weight of the vessel.”

The contract calls for CNL to provide NASA a one-meter prototype of a quantum wire by 2010. This will require major breakthroughs in the production and processing of nanotubes. There are hundreds of different configurations of individual carbon nanotubes, and realization of the quantum wire depends on bulk production of nanotubes of exactly the same configuration. The best configuration of nanotube for the wire is the “armchair” structure tube, which conducts electrons extremely well and may be the only type that will serve effectively in quantum wires.

“We need to find a way to make just the nanotubes we want, and we need them in large quantities,” CNL Executive Director Howard Schmidt said. “Another major focus of the research will be finding new ways to combine armchair nanotubes, which are single molecules just a billionth of a meter wide, into large-scale fibers and wires.”

CNL is pioneering new methods for production of type-selected nanotubes at the laboratory scale, and CNI will be working with CNL to scale these new production methods up to the levels required for commercialization of the quantum wire and other innovative technologies that the type-selected carbon nanotubes enable.

Though the project will require major breakthroughs, Rice has already pioneered methods that could lead to solutions in both production and fiber spinning. For example, CNL’s latest research on nanotube growth, which will appear on the cover of the June issue of the journal Nano Letters, involves the first known method of catalyzing new growth onto old nanotubes — new growth that mirrors the precise physical and electrical properties of the pre-existing tubes. With regard to fiber spinning, Smalley and colleagues created a new fiber-spinning process for nanotubes in 2003 that is similar to the process used to make Kevlar on an industrial scale.

In fact, the lab’s prior success in nanotube research played a key role in securing the quantum wire contract. Under the Vision for Space Exploration program, NASA received more than 3,700 pre-proposals and 485 full proposals, mostly from leading aerospace firms.