Carbon nanotubes are among the most promising materials under investigation today, having the ability to set the foundation for a large number of innovations, ranging from new medicines to communication grids and space elevators. Only one problem plagued this field of research, and that was the maximum attainable length of the carbon nanotubes (CNT) themselves. Now, thanks to an innovation from experts at the Rice University, that obstacle may be behind scientists, Technology Review reports.

Each individual CNT is extremely durable, lightweight and resilient, but the technological difficulty scientists faced was connecting the tubes among themselves in such a manner that a wire would result. This is a must for creating future communication networks, which will require these high-capacity, very light wires for relaying data between terminals. The RU managed to finally discover the perfect solution, and realized that longer nanotubes could be grown by using a substance known as a superacid. The idea was first envisioned by the late Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, in 2001.

Until now, several methods of creating longer CNT have been tested, but each of them has had its drawbacks. The most common flaw was their complexity, which did not allow for a commercially convenient scaling up of the entire process to the industrial scale. “The alignment is not spectacular, and these methods are difficult to scale up,” Matteo Pasquali, a Rice University chemical engineering professor, explains. In order to improve the electrical and mechanical properties of a CNT wire, it is essential that individual nanotubes are carefully aligned and ordered, he adds.

According to the expert, the RU method is fairly simple to implement, and the resulting CNT shoot out of nozzles similar to shower heads, directly trimmed to the desired size. Smalley was the one who came up with the idea that, if experts were to grow CNT in solutions, then the tubes would arrange themselves like logs on water, and grow to longer sizes than thought possible at the time. Over the past five years, the RU team tried various types of acids as a solution. “There was no quick experiment. We had to be very deliberate. We now understand how the solution processing works, the knobs to control the nanotubes, and how to predict what they'll do,” Pasquali reveals.