Is this a key to much lighter aerospace structures? Lighter aircraft would be more fuel efficient, but it seems to me that the big payoff would be in mass fraction for launch vehicles and spacecraft.
4 thoughts on “Nanostitching”
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I see a weight reduction opportunity, but I’m not sure I see “much” lighter. It says 10x strengtening at the weakest point, but I don’t think that translates into 1/10th the weight or anything close to that. Other than that strength ratio, I didn’t see actual weight reduction numbers. Considering this is primarily lowering bondline weight, I’m not sure if there is a lot of gain here.
That’s not to say this isn’t a great advancement. I’m just not sure I’d call this a “key”.
I, too, was left wondering where the weight savings came in. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps you could get rid of a ply or two, and still maintain strength of the shell?
I suppose it would depend on how much the strength of an air frame is dependent on the number of plies, and how dependent it is on the resistance to delamination.
Baytubes is talking about 10-30% lighter components. There is also recent work strengthening kevlar by dipping in carbon nanotubes.
So 10% better weight in the nearterm
Then 30% in mid term and then maybe more.
There is new cambridge nanotethers that are 4-5 times stronger than regular kevlar by weight and would three times stronger than regular carbon fiber.
Baytubes: The length of the rotor blades in wind turbines is limited by their weight. Rotor blades manufactured from the new composite material based on carbon and glass fiber-reinforced epoxides with carbon nanotubes are 10 to 30 percent lighter and also much stronger than straight epoxy systems. The material’s impact strength, for example, is 20 to 30 percent higher and its fatigue properties are 50 to 200 percent better.
This is brilliant, and might actually work, which is more than you can say about almost all other “nanotech.” It comes straight out of decades of work on microstructure in polymeric composites, so it has a very respectable pedigree.
I would suggest the major benefit is in safety. My vague impression is that a significant drag on the use of composites is the fact that their long-term failure modes are (1) appallingly dramatic, e.g. the tails that suddenly snap off Airbuses, and (2) very difficult to predict or even characterize well. So reliable improvements in safety might allow composites to percolate into more plain applications dominated by steel and aluminum, lowering weight, especially moving weight, improving heat resistance, reducing the problems of corrosion.
But the engineering/economic aspects here are not well represented in my knowledge space.