Artificial muscles using folded graphene

Folded Graphene Concept

Two years ago I wrote a blog on future hosiery where I very briefly mentioned the idea of using folded graphene as synthetic muscles:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/the-future-of-nylon-ladder-free-hosiery/

Although I’ve since mentioned it to dozens of journalists, none have picked up on it, so now that soft robotics and artificial muscles are in the news, I guess it’s about time I wrote it up myself, before someone else claims the idea. I don’t want to see an MIT article about how they have just invented it.

The above pic gives the general idea. Graphene comes in insulating or conductive forms, so it will be possible to make sheets covered with tiny conducting graphene electromagnet coils that can be switched individually to either polarity and generate strong magnetic forces that pull or push as required. That makes it ideal for a synthetic muscle, given the potential scale. With 1.5nm-thick layers that could be anything from sub-micron up to metres wide, this will allow thin fibres and yarns to make muscles or shape change fabrics all the way up to springs or cherry-picker style platforms, using many such structures. Current can be switched on and off or reversed very rapidly, to make continuous forces or vibrations, with frequency response depending on application – engineering can use whatever scales are needed. Natural muscles are limited to 250Hz, but graphene synthetic muscles should be able to go to MHz.

Uses vary from high-rise rescue, through construction and maintenance, to space launch. Since the forces are entirely electromagnetic, they could be switched very rapidly to respond to any buckling, offering high stabilisation.

The extreme difference in dimensions between folded and opened state mean that an extremely thin force mat made up of many of these cherry-picker structures could be made to fill almost any space and apply force to it. One application that springs to mind is rescues, such as after earthquakes have caused buildings to collapse. A sheet could quickly apply pressure to prize apart pieces of rubble regardless of size and orientation. It could alternatively be used for systems for rescuing people from tall buildings, fracking or many other applications.

It would be possible to make large membranes for a wide variety of purposes that can change shape and thickness at any point, very rapidly.

One such use is a ‘jellyfish’, complete with stinging cells that could travel around in even very thin atmospheres all by itself. Upper surfaces could harvest solar power to power compression waves that create thrust. This offers use for space exploration on other planets, but also has uses on Earth of course, from surveillance and power generation, through missile defense systems or self-positioning parachutes that may be used for my other invention, the Pythagoras Sling. That allows a totally rocket-free space launch capability with rapid re-use.

Much thinner membranes are also possible, as shown here, especially suited for rapid deployment missile defense systems:

Also particularly suited to space exploration o other planets or moons, is the worm, often cited for such purposes. This could easily be constructed using folded graphene, and again for rescue or military use, could come with assorted tools or lethal weapons built in.

A larger scale cherry-picker style build could make ejector seats, elevation platforms or winches, either pushing or pulling a payload – each has its merits for particular types of application.  Expansion or contraction could be extremely rapid.

An extreme form for space launch is the zip-winch, below. With many layers just 1.5nm thick, expanding to 20cm for each such layer, a 1000km winch cable could accelerate a payload rapidly as it compresses to just 7.5mm thick!

Very many more configurations and uses are feasible of course, this blog just gives a few ideas. I’ll finish with a highlight I didn’t have time to draw up yet: small particles could be made housing a short length of folded graphene. Since individual magnets can be addressed and controlled, that enables magnetic powders with particles that can change both their shape and the magnetism of individual coils. Precision magnetic fields is one application, shape changing magnets another. The most exciting though is that this allows a whole new engineering field, mixing hydraulics with precision magnetics and shape changing. The powder can even create its own chambers, pistons, pumps and so on. Electromagnetic thrusters for ships are already out there, and those same thrust mechanisms could be used to manipulate powder particles too, but this allows for completely dry hydraulics, with particles that can individually behave actively or  passively.

Fun!

 

 

A revolutionary new space launch idea: Introducing The Pythagoras Sling

The Pythagoras Sling uses a lengthy graphene string pulled via two hoops suspended from simple parachutes to rapidly accelerate a projectile into orbit. Graphene string will likely become widely available over the next two decades. If it works as expected, the Pythagoras Sling launch system could greatly reduce the cost of getting into space compared to any current rocket-based system and could help accelerate space development. Total cost of the fully reusable launch system could be as low as $1M for small and medium sized satellites so cost per kg could be two orders of magnitude cheaper than today. Apart for human spacecraft or more delicate satellites that need low g-forces, the system needs little or no fuel to achieve orbit, only ground electricity, so would be safer and more environmentally friendly as well as cheaper than current rocket-based approaches.

The breakthrough was to see that large parachutes could be used as effective temporary ‘sky anchors’ for hoops, through which tethers may be pulled that are attached to a projectile. The parachutes will of course fall, but will remain high enough to fill their purpose during the entire launch. No other space launch concept has ever used parachutes in this way.

This system is not yet feasible because of limitations of current materials, but will quickly become feasible in a wide range of roles as materials specifications improve with ongoing graphene and carbon composite development. Eventually it will be capable of launching satellites into low Earth orbit, and greatly reduce rocket size and fuel needed for human space missions. The system was invented by UK futurologist Dr I D Pearson will the kind assistance of Prof Nick Colosimo. Graphene itself was also a UK discovery.

More detail is here: Pythagoras Sling article

Using Inverse Rail Guns for assisted space launch

Following on from the last article on skyline hypersonic travel, Carbon Devices will shortly announce a future space launch system with variants covering a wide range of capabilities. These will range from ultra-cheap launch of lightweight satellites into sub-orbital trajectories up to full orbital launch of large satellites or spacecraft with human crews. The system relies on novel carbon materials only in development today, but that will be routinely available in a decade or two. Once they are, this new system will offer space launches orders of magnitude cheaper and safer than current space launch systems and avoid the environmentally damaging emissions or water vapour in the high atmosphere associated with primitive rocket technology. With far lower launch costs and improved safety, the space industry will flourish.

In the next few posts, several inventions will be disclosed that may be used in our launch systems and weapons. In this article, we explain the first of those, a new technique for driving a tape through a motor at high speed using only electricity. It is related to the rail gun, currently the highest powered artillery system in action, with today’s guns able to launch 10kg metal slugs at over 2km/s, with energy of around 32MJ. By comparison, the Carbon Devices inverse rail gun will be able to launch 60kg slugs at over 50km/s and that is just the scaled down land-based variant. If you believe as we do that the route to peace is to talk softly but carry a big stick, then this is one of our big sticks. We need to learn to talk more softly to each other, because future battlefields will use weapons hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than today’s. The gulf between conventional and nuclear weapons will fully close by mid-century. This pic is a crude example of a fairly modest space weapon with a short tape. Even this would have 3TJ energy, about 100,000 times more than today’s rail gun and 0.75 kilotons of TNT equivalent. This version would only work in space but that’s where some battles in future wars will be fought. Anyway, enough about weapons, the best use of this tech is to launch spacecraft, both from space and into space.

The Carbon Devices inverse rail gun uses exactly the same linear motor principle of the conventional rail gun, with current passing along and between the rails via the ‘slug’, but effectively inverts the idea of a slug by using a continuous tape of engineered graphene, through which high current is passed to generate the pulling magnetic field. As each short segment of the tape is pulled forwards, the rest follows behind, and although the short segment being driven suffers high heating levels due to the high currents involved, new segments of tape are continuously pulled into play as heated segments exit. The tape as a whole will survive because only a small segment at any time is being subjected to high current, but of course the entire length of tape following is accelerated, along with the attached payload. The length of the tape and thus the exit speed achievable is only limited by practicality. The tape drive has a wide range of applications from ultra-high powered rail guns with exit energy hundreds of times that of current weapons, right up to a super-fast multi-motor space system that will one day deliver crew members or supplies such as water or materials to Mars bases in just 5 days, with a launch speed of 800km/s. Even that speed is limited mainly by the slow acceleration forces that humans can cope with. Another variant that fires inert payloads is an asteroid defense system and the achievable speeds for that could be far higher. This pic gives a crude idea of the concept, using many low powered ‘rail gun’ motors.

This powerful propulsion system is scalable  (the system shown uses multiple motors and a very long string), and exit speed is only limited by the practical size and cost of the system. 800km/s is a sensible compromise size for routine space missions, since the size of the system scales with the square of the exit speed needed. Because of that, it can not be any practical use for interstellar missions, where technology such as light sails offer much greater suitability. Even if used in conjunction with a light sail, it could only knock a few weeks off a 100 year flight time. (For those of you with weapons interests, the Mars commute system carries about 360TJ, or 85 kilotons of TNT energy equivalent, well into nuclear territory. I haven’t bothered to calculate how powerful it would be if militarized instead of running at just 5g acceleration. ‘Very’ is a good enough guess.

In space, the tape will naturally start very cold which will be an advantage, and of course the tape can also be laid out in a long line to avoid assorted mechanical issues. All of that makes high speeds reasonably feasible. On the Earth however, it is very hard to arrange for a tape to be laid out in a long line, and spooling and indeed unspooling speeds present a huge mechanical engineering problem, not least of which is that a spool spinning at high rpm is dangerous in itself. Aerodynamic heating is also a huge issue for ultra-high speeds. Therefore, land-based variants need to be greatly scaled down. A number of people over the years have suggested using rail guns to launch things into space, and heating is always a severely limiting problem. The novel system we will announce isn’t a rail gun launch and neatly circumvents this problem.

Having said that, rail gun space launch is not impossible and we have devised two novel launch variants using the rail gun linear motor principle. Carbon Devices’ graphene foam invention in 2013 outlined a solid foam that could be made lighter than helium, that would be ideal for supporting loads in the high atmosphere. MIT have more recently produced a lightweight 3d-printed matrix that could be used to print larger shells containing only vacuum (and they could even be printed at high altitude to avoid collapse in the high pressure lower atmosphere).

If circuits for a linear motor are made from graphene and on a graphene substrate, all supported by such floating platforms, then a long, vertical, linear motor could be made and supported in the air that could accelerate a sled with a disposable heat shield front end, holding a rocket. Depending on acceleration tolerable, fairly high speeds can be obtained, and although not fast enough for orbit, would greatly reduce the size of rocket needed to achieve orbit.

The first variant is entirely vertical. The rocket and crew or satellite payload would be attached to a sled, and the reusable sled would accelerate up the linear motor. With a few system engineering tweaks, it is feasible to make the path at least 35km high, with an exit speed of around 4000mph (1750m/s) for the 5g acceleration launch that is acceptable for astronauts. Although 4000mph is fast, it is no more than a useful starter push for a rocket that needs to reach the 17,500mph of the space station. Additionally, vertical speed is a useful boost, but no use in itself for orbit – a rocket travelling vertically would simply fall back to Earth eventually unless it gets high horizontal speed.

However, our second variant curves the track into a horizontal path at high altitude, again supported along its entire length by floating platforms made from carbon foam.

Assuming a 150km track, most of which is 35km high, we would have an expensive but reusable launch system that could accelerate humans up to 8600mph (3800m/s), about half way to orbital speed, and that would all be horizontal speed. It is easily possible to engineer the final sections of track to be higher in the atmosphere, and a slight incline would get our rocket out of atmosphere quickly to minimise heating issues, but the main benefit is that most of the high speed happens in the cold and thin high atmosphere. Such as system is feasible and would greatly reduce launch costs for human spacecraft. For a non-human payload, a 150km track can give full orbital speed for payloads that can tolerate in excess of 20g acceleration. Very many fall in that category, so this system could one day be used to achieve a fuel-free orbital launch.

As mentioned, these are only early system designs and forthcoming articles will outline more advanced Carbon Devices systems with greater potential to accelerate space development.

Sky lines

High altitude solar array to power IT and propel planes

Skylines are a zero carbon hypersonic air travel solution, a high altitude solar farm, a base for all sorts of high altitude electronics and even as a booster to reduce rocket engine size to get to orbit by getting spacecraft up to high hypersonic speeds before they need to fire engines. Well, most of the bits would be made of carbon materials, but it wouldn’t emit any CO2.

The pic says it all. A linear solar farm suspended in the high atmosphere (20km – 30km high) to provide an IT platform for sensors, comms and other functions often accomplished by low orbit satellite. It would float up there thanks to being fixed to a graphene foam base layer that can be made lighter than helium (my previous invention, see

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/could-graphene-foam-be-a-future-helium-substitute/

which has since been prototyped and proven to be extremely resilient to high pressures too). Ideally, it would go all the way around the world, in various inclinations at different altitudes to provide routes to many places. More likely, it would connect a few major locations. Carbon materials are also incredibly strong so the line can be made as strong as can reasonably be required. Graphene is ideal for its weight, strength and most of all its electrical properties. It is perfect for making the various electrical circuits and as a base for solar panels.

This linear solar array would produce huge electric power, which is a potential use in itself, but housing various low ‘satellites’ would be even more useful, especially for comms where the latency would be lower than higher satellites and for surveillance where monitors will be closer to the ground.

As well as these, the flotation layer could also supports a hypersonic linear induction motor that could provide direct propulsion to a hypersonic glider or to electric props on a powered plane. Obviously this could also provide a means of making extremely low earth orbit satellites that continuously circumnavigate the ring. Once a plane is being pulled, it doesn’t need to breathe air for its engines, and with very thin air heating is less of an issue so it could go faster. High hypersonic speeds may be possible, making global air travel much faster and less environmentally damaging.

I know you’re asking already how the planes get up there. There are a few solutions.  Most likely they would use conventional engines to do so, and dock with a tether and sled once at a suitable height. Tethers could move to intercept, like a relay team’s members coordinating speed for handing over the baton, and a longer tether obviously means the plane doesn’t have to climb so high. Once it is tethered, of course it could climb a lot higher to escape air resistance, and some kinds of planes could even fly above the skyline, in very thin air, for super high speeds or even to assist in sub-orbital launches by reducing the needs for rockets. In theory, tethers could come all the way to ground level to airports, and electric engines powered by the skyline would then be used to get to height where the plane would pick up a sled-link, or else stronger links to the ground would allow planes to be pulled up by sleds, though these options would be far less feasible, because both mean that the air would have dangerous tethers dangling causing potential risks to other craft.

The power levels needed can be determined by looking at existing planes engines. The engines on a Boeing 777 generate about 8.25MW. A high altitude solar cell, above clouds could generate 300W per square metre. So a 777 equivalent plane needs 55km of panels if the line is just one metre wide. That means planes need to be at least that distance apart, but since that equates to around a minute, that is no barrier at all.

If you still doubt this, the Hyperloop was just a crazy idea when it was invented a century ago too. Now various companies are building demonstrators.

To finish on a tease, I mention above the potential for this to help spacecraft up to speed before they need to fire rocket engines. Although skylines are both feasible and useful for this, Carbon Devices is currently exploring some far superior ways of reaching space, but we are not ready to disclose them quite yet.

High Rise Rescue

A quick googling turned up this great idea, using an escape chute attached to the top of a fire crane. The chute has a fireproof external layer and people slow or speed their descent in it simply by varying their posture. Read the pdf for more details:

http://www.escapeconsult.biz/download.php?module=prod&id=26

The picture tells all you really need to know. You can see it reaches very high, up to 100m with the tallest fire appliance.

It is a great idea, but you can still see how it could be improved, and the manufacturer may well already have better versions on the way.

Firstly, the truck is already leaning, even though it has extendable feet to increase the effective base area. This affects all free-standing fire rescue cranes and ladders (suspension ladders, or ladders able to lean against a wall obviously include other forces). Physics dictates that the center of gravity, with the evacuees included, must remain above the base or it will start to topple. The higher it reaches and the further from the truck, the harder that becomes, and the fewer people can simultaneously use the escape chute. Clearly if it is go even higher, we need to find new ways of keeping the base and center of gravity aligned, or to prevent it toppling by leaning the ladder securely against a sound piece of wall that isn’t above a fire.

One solution is obvious. Usually with a high-rise fire, a number of fire appliances would be there. By linking several appliances to the ladder in a stable pattern, the base area then becomes far larger, the entire area enclosed by the combined appliances. At the very least, they can spread out across a street, and sometimes as in the Grenfell Tower fire, there is a lot of nearby space to spread over. With a number of fire appliances, the crane is also not limited to the carrying capacity of a single appliance.

If these are specialist hi-rise appliances, one or two would carry telescopic arms to support the rescue equipment, with one or more trucks using tension wires to increase the base area.

We also need to speed up entry to the chute and preferably make it accessible to more windows. The existing system has access via a small hole that might be slow to pass through, and challenging for larger people or those with less mobility. A funneled design would allow people to jump in from several windows or even drop from a floor above. Designing the access to prevent simultaneous arrivals at the chute is easy enough, even if several people jump in together

Also, it would be good if the chute could take evacuees away from the building and flames as fast as possible. Getting them to the ground is a lesser priority. Designing the funnel so it crosses several windows, with a steep slope away from the building (like an airplane escape slide) before it enters the downward chute would do that.

Another enhancement would be that instead of a broad funnel and single chute, a number of chutes could be suspended, with one for each window. Several people would be able to descend down different chutes at the same time. with a much broader base area, toppling risk would still be greatly reduced.

If a few support arms could be extended from the crane towards the building, that would provide extra stability until their strength (or building fabric) is compromised by fire. Further support might sometimes be available from window cleaning platform apparatus that could support the weight of the rescue chutes. If emergency escape chutes are built into the platforms could even make for an instant escape system before fire services arrive.

With these relatively straightforward enhancements, this evacuation system would be even better and would allow many people to escape who otherwise wouldn’t. OK, here’s a badly drawn pic:

All of this is possible with 2017 materials. As new carbon materials become economically available, it will be feasible to make the reach and size of this much greater and still stay within reasonable weight.

Carbon Devices (CD) is currently investigating mechanisms for rapid deployment of adaptive landing bags made from CD’s innovative graphene-based FG technology, that behave rather like smart air bags onto which people could safely jump, that could both actively intercept them if they don’t jump accurately, and give them a managed safe deceleration on landing.

Our FG is also the basis of rapid-deployment high towers also under investigation that could be used to get fire crews and equipment (or robotic equipment) to height to tackle fires. FG could greatly accelerate the processes of evacuation and getting fires under control.

FG will have a variety of other types of applications, since it can be used to make almost any volumetric or planar construction extremely rapidly, using enormous expansion capability coupled to high strength. In fact, in the above diagram, FG could provide the the tension members, compression members and support arms, as well as the escape chutes.

Carbon Devices Ltd has just been set up

Well, this all started with a frivolous idea a few years back when I invented a bunch of stuff for my sci-fi book Space Anchor. Recently, I have made a number of inventions (dozens in fact) that rely on graphene or carbon nanotubes or other carbon-based materials. Some are civil, many are weapons, and the company will own both sites, carbonweapons.com and this one, carbondevices.com.

I decided it is about time to set up a proper company rather than just a blog site. So I did, Carbon Devices Ltd.

It will own all the carbon-related intellectual property that I have invented over the last years. This site currently shows a few older ideas, as does the partner site carbonweapons.com, but all of the company’s recent intellectual property is as yet unpublished. Patenting or blogging ideas removes the bulk of their commercial value as inventions and publicity and ‘exposure’ is insufficient as a business model. Instead, short descriptors of ideas will sometimes be released that do not convey the important engineering details.

Some important ideas and concepts will however be fully disclosed for the public good, where the company does not intend to develop or sell them, but wants to make them publicly available to anyone free of charge and restriction and prevent others from seizing or controlling them. Such technical disclosures will be intended to disclose sufficient engineering detail to prevent others patenting them.

Some recent exciting and valuable space ideas will fall into that category. Watch this space!

Driverless pod transport system

I badly documented my latest idea of an ultra-cheap transport system in https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/an-ultra-cheap-future-transport-system/. I think I need another blog to separate out the idea from the background. Look at my previous blog for the appropriate pictures.

We’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm now for electric cars and in parallel, for self-driving cars. I support both of those, and I like the new Next system that is extremely close to my own ideas from 1987 when I first looked at cars from a performance engineer’s viewpoint and realized that self driving cars could drive millimeters apart, reducing drag and greatly reducing congestion. I estimated back then that they could improve road capacity by a factor of 5. Many others have since simulated such systems and the same factor of 5 has popped up a few times now.

Self-driving pods and electrically assisted bike lane

Next have visualized the same idea nicely, but the world is more receptive now. http://www.techinsider.io/italys-next-created-self-driving-pods-that-can-connect-in-motion-to-form-a-train-2015-10

https://youtu.be/Wk12TmZ3GiQ for their nice video, although I’d envisage rather more pods in most areas, almost filling the entire road area.

I’ve lectured in vain many times to persuade authorities to divert investment away from 20th century rail system to roads using self driving cars. The UK’s HS2 system is no more than lipstick on a 20th century pig. Pig it remains, obsolete ages ago, though our idiotic government remains determined to build it anyway, wasting £70Bn even by charitable estimates. Systems similar to Next’s could replace HS2 and reduce journey times for everyone, not just those whose starting point and destination are very close to the terminals. I wish them well. But I think there is an even better solution, that is feasible in a similar time-frame, and I have no doubt they could pick it up and run with it. Or Tesla or Google or Apple or Toyota or any other car company.

My realization is that we don’t need self driving cars either. Take exactly the Next system, with its nicely trapezoidal pods that nest together. They will need a smooth road surface if they are to ride in contact or millimeters apart, or they will constantly bump into each other and create irritating vibration. Make them ride a centimeter or two apart and it will solve that.

Then start looking at each part of the system.

They each have a computer on board to drive the pod. You don’t need that, because everyone has a smart phone now which already has formidable computing power and is connected to the cloud, which has vast amounts more. Together, the entire system can be easily managed without any computers on board at all.

Similarly, much of the internal decor in cars is there to make it look pretty, offer interfaces, information or displays for passenger entertainment. All of that could easily be done by any half-decent augmented reality visor.

Then look at the power supply and engines. We should at the very least expect electric motors to replace fossil fuel engines. Most self-driving cars have expensive batteries, using scarce resources, and lithium batteries may catch fire or explode. So some systems in R&D now use the idea of super-capacitors instead. Furthermore, these could be recharged periodically as they drive over special mats on the road surface, so they could be smaller, lighter and cheaper. Even that is now being trialed. So these systems would already be better in almost every way to today’s transport.

However, we don’t even need the electric motors and super-capacitors. Instead we could update the ancient but well-proven idea of the linear induction motor and make factory-produced mats containing circuits that can be instructed to make steerable magnetic wells that pull the cars along, as well as navigate them correctly at every junction. Again, the management can all be done by the cloud plus smartphones, and the circuits can reconfigure on command as each pod passes over them. So they won’t need batteries, or super-capacitor banks, or engines or motors. They would just be pulled along by magnetic fields, with no moving parts (apart from the pods as a whole of course) to go wrong, and almost nothing needing expensive maintenance. Apart from wheels, suspension and brakes.

So the driverless pod would not need a built-in computer, it would not need an engine or motor, and not need a battery or super-capacitor. Already it would be vastly cheaper.

The last remaining moving parts can also be dispensed with. If the pod rides above a mat that can generate the magnetic fields to drag it along, why not let other magnetic fields suspend it above the ground? That would mean it doesn’t need suspension, or wheels. Conventional brakes could be dispensed with using a combination of magnetic fields for normal braking,  combined with a fallback of gravity and brake strips for emergency braking. Reducing the levitation field would create friction with the road surface and stop the vehicle very quickly, far more quickly than a conventional car can stop, only really limited by comfort limitations.

So my proposal is a system that would look and behave very similar to what Next have designed, but would not need engines, batteries, on-board computers or even wheels. My pods would be no more than simple boxes with comfy seats (or empty for freight transport) and a couple of strips on the bottom and might cost no more than $200 each. The road would have a factory-made mat laid on top for the magnetic well trains and levitation. Adapting a road to the system would be an overnight laying out of the mat and plugging it in to the electricity supply. In cold seasons, that electricity supply could also power on-board heating (but that would incur extra expense of course)

It won’t be long before such a system could be built. I can’t see any fundamental barriers to a prototype appearing next year if some entrepreneur were to try. It could make self driving car systems, even Next’s current proposals, redundant before they are implemented. If we were to change the direction of current plans to utilize the latest technology, rather than using ideas from 30 years ago, we could have a cheaper, better, more environmentally friendly system even faster. We could probably build such as system in every major city for what we are going to waste on HS2. Surely that is worth a try.

The future of nylon: ladder-free hosiery

Last week I outlined the design for a 3D printer that can print and project graphene filaments at 100m/s. That was designed to be worn on the wrist like Spiderman’s, but an industrial version could print faster. When I checked a few of the figures, I discovered that the spinnerets for making nylon stockings run at around the same speed. That means that graphene stockings could be made at around the same speed. My print head produced 140 denier graphene yarn but it made that from many finer filaments so basically any yarn thickness from a dozen carbon atoms right up to 140 denier would be feasible.

The huge difference is that a 140 denier graphene thread is strong enough to support a man at 2g acceleration. 10 denier stockings are made from yarn that breaks quite easily, but unless I’ve gone badly wrong on the back of my envelope, 10 denier graphene would have roughly 10kg (22lb)breaking strain. That’s 150 times stronger than nylon yarn of the same thickness.

If so, then that would mean that a graphene stocking would have incredible strength. A pair of 10 denier graphene stockings or tights (pantyhose) might last for years without laddering. That might not be good news for the nylon stocking industry, but I feel confident they would adapt easily to such potential.

Alternatively, much finer yarns could be made that would still have reasonable ladder resistance, so that would also affect the visual appearance and texture. They could be made so fine that the fibers are invisible even up close. People might not always want that, but the key message is that wear-resistant, ladder free hosiery could be made that has any gauge from 0.1 denier to 140 denier.

There is also a bonus that graphene is a superb conductor. That means that graphene fibers could be woven into nylon hosiery to add circuits. Those circuits might be to harvest radio energy, act as an aerial, power LEDS in the hosiery or change its colors or patterns. So even if it isn’t used for the whole garment, it might still have important uses in the garment as an addition to the weave.

There is yet another bonus. Graphene circuits could allow electrical supply to shape changing polymers that act rather like muscles, contracting when a voltage is applied across them, so that a future pair of tights could shape a leg far better, with tensions and pressures electronically adjusted over the leg to create the perfect shape. Graphene can make electronic muscles directly too, but in a more complex mechanism (e.g. using magnetic field generation and interaction, or capacitors and electrical attraction/repulsion).

Spiderman-style silk thrower

I quite like Spiderman movies, and having the ability to fire a web at a distant object or villain has its appeal. Since he fires web from his forearm, it must be lightweight to withstand the recoil, and to fire enough to hold his weight while he swings, it would need to have extremely strong fibers. It is therefore pretty obvious that the material of choice when we build such a thing will be graphene, which is even stronger than spider silk (though I suppose a chemical ejection device making spider silk might work too). A thin graphene thread is sufficient to hold him as he swings so it could fit inside a manageable capsule.

So how to eject it?

One way I suggested for making graphene threads is to 3D print the graphene, using print nozzles made of carbon nanotubes and using a very high-speed modulation to spread the atoms at precise spacing so they emerge in the right physical patterns and attach appropriate positive or negative charge to each atom as they emerge from the nozzles so that they are thrown together to make them bond into graphene. This illustration tries to show the idea looking at the nozzles end on, but shows only a part of the array:It doesn’t show properly that the nozzles are at angles to each other and the atoms are ejected in precise phased patterns, but they need to be, since the atoms are too far apart to form graphene otherwise so they need to eject at the right speed in the right directions with the right charges at the right times and if all that is done correctly then a graphene filament would result. The nozzle arrangements, geometry and carbon atom sizes dictate that only narrow filaments of graphene can be produced by each nozzle, but as the threads from many nozzles are intertwined as they emerge from the spinneret, so a graphene thread would be produced made from many filaments. Nevertheless, it is possible to arrange carbon nanotubes in such a way and at the right angle, so provided we can get the high-speed modulation and spacing right, it ought to be feasible. Not easy, but possible. Then again, Spiderman isn’t real yet either.

The ejection device would therefore be a specially fabricated 3D print head maybe a square centimeter in area, backed by a capsule containing finely powdered graphite that could be vaporized to make the carbon atom stream through the nozzles. Some nice lasers might be good there, and some cool looking electronic add-ons to do the phasing and charging. You could make this into one heck of a cool gun.

How thick a thread do we need?

Assuming a 70kg (154lb) man and 2g acceleration during the swing, we need at least 150kg breaking strain to have a small safety margin, bearing in mind that if it breaks, you can fire a new thread. Steel can achieve that with 1.5mm thick wire, but graphene’s tensile strength is 300 times better than steel so 0.06mm is thick enough. 60 microns, or to put it another way, roughly 140 denier, although that is a very quick guess. That means roughly the same sort of graphene thread thickness is needed to support our Spiderman as the nylon used to make your backpack. It also means you could eject well over 10km of thread from a 200g capsule, plenty. Happy to revise my numbers if you have better ones. Google can be a pain!

How fast could the thread be ejected?

Let’s face it. If it can only manage 5cm/s, it is as much use as a chocolate flamethrower. Each bond in graphene is 1.4 angstroms long, so a graphene hexagon is about 0.2nm wide. We would want our graphene filament to eject at around 100m/s, about the speed of a crossbow bolt. 100m/s = 5 x 10^11 carbon atoms ejected per second from each nozzle, in staggered phasing. So, half a terahertz. Easy! That’s well within everyday electronics domains. Phew! If we can do better, we can shoot even faster.

We could therefore soon have a graphene filament ejection device that behaves much like Spiderman’s silk throwers. It needs some better engineers than me to build it, but there are plenty of them around.

Having such a device would be fun for sports, allowing climbers to climb vertical rock faces and overhangs quickly, or to make daring leaps and hope the device works to save them from certain death. It would also have military and police uses. It might even have uses in road accident prevention, yanking pedestrians away from danger or tethering cars instantly to slow them extra quickly. In fact, all the emergency services would have uses for such devices and it could reduce accidents and deaths. I feel confident that Spiderman would think of many more exciting uses too.

Producing graphene silk at 100m/s might also be pretty useful in just about every other manufacturing industry. With ultra-fine yarns with high strength produced at those speeds, it could revolutionize the fashion industry too.

Using carbon to make a Landspeeder or hoverboard

You are probably familiar with Marty McFly’s hovering skateboard and the Star Wars Landspeeder hover-car. How feasible are they? Like most futurists, I get asked about flying cars every week.

Let’s dispose of pedantry first. Flying cars do exist. Some are basically vertical take off planes without the wings, using directed air jets to stay afloat and move. I guess you could use a derivative of that to make a kind of land-speeder. The hovercraft is also a bit Landspeedery, but works differently. Hovercraft are OK, but a Landspeeder floats higher off the ground and without the skirt so it it’s no hovercraft. Well, we’ll see.

Carbon can be used to make a Star Wars Landspeeder or Marty McFly’s hover board from Back to the Future. Both would be almost silent, with no need for messy skirts, fans, or noisy ducted air jet engines, and could looks like the ones in the films. Or you could employ a designer and make one that looks nice instead.

 

Anti-gravity may one day be possible but we don’t know how to do that yet. Conventional wisdom says that either you use noisy ducted air jets or a hovercraft skirt, or else magnetic levitation, as the Landspeeder is meant to be anyway, which can be done but so far needs a special metal track. It couldn’t work on a pavement or side-walk. You can’t use simple magnetic repulsion effects to levitate above concrete or asphalt.

I pointed out a good while ago with my linear induction bicycle lane idea that you could use a McFly style hover-board on it. My daughter’s friends were teasing me about futurists and hoverboards – that’s why.

http://timeguide.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/hover-boards/

That would work. It would be totally silent. However, the Landspeeder didn’t stay on a linear induction mat laid just under the entire desert surface, did it? That would just be silly. If you had a linear induction mat laid under the entire desert surface, you’d put some sort of horse shoes on your camel and it could just glide everywhere at high speed. You wouldn’t need the Landspeeder.

Ignoring conventional wisdom, with some redesign, you can use magnetic levitation to produce a landspeeder or hoverboard that would work on a sidewalk, pavement, road, or even a desert surface. Not water, not the way McFly did anyway. You could also make the hover tanks and everything else that silently hovers near the ground in sci-fi films. And force fields. Sand, asphalt and concrete aren’t made of metal but that doesn’t matter.

Graphene is a really good conductor. Expensive still, but give it a few years and it’ll be everywhere. It is a superb material. With graphene, you can make thin tubes, bigger than carbon nanotubes but still small bore. You could use those to make coils around electron pipes, maybe even the pipes themselves. Electron pipes are particle guides along which you can send any kind of charged particles at high speed, keeping them confined using strong magnetic fields, produced by the coils around the pipe, a mini particle accelerator. I originally invented electron pipes as a high bandwidth (at least 10^22bit/s) upgrade for optical fibre, but they have other uses too such as on-chip interconnect, 3d biomimetic microprinting for things like graphene tubes, space elevator rope and others. In this case, they have two uses.

First you’d use a covering of the pipes on the vehicle underside to inject a strong charge flux into the air beneath the hoverboard (if you’re a sci-fi nut, you could store the energy to do this in a super-capacitor and if you’re really twisted you might even call it a flux capacitor, since it will be used in the system to make this electron flux). The result is a highly charged mass of air. Plasma. So what?

Well, you’d also use some rings of these tubes around the periphery of the vehicle to create a very strong wall of magnetic field beneath the vehicle edge. This would keep the charged air from just diffusing. In addition, you’d direct some of them downwards to create a flow of charged air that would act to repel the air inside, further keeping it confined to a higher depth, or altitude, so you could hover quite a distance off the ground.

As a quick but important aside, you should be able to use it for making layered force fields too, (using layers of separated and repelling layers of charged air. They should resist small forces trying to bend them and would certainly disrupt any currents trying to get through. But maybe they would not be mechanically strong ones. So, not strong enough to stop bullets, but enough to stop or severely disrupt charges from basic plasma weaponry, but there aren’t many of them yet so that isn’t much of a benefit. Anyway… back to the future.

Having done this, you’ll hopefully have a cushion of highly charged air under your vehicle, confined within its circumference, and some basic vents could make up for any small losses. I am guessing this air is probably highly conductive, so it could be used to generate both magnetic and electrostatic forces with the fields produced by all those coils and pipes in the vehicle.

So now, you’d basically have a high-tech, silent electromagnetic hovercraft without a skirt to hold the air in, floating above pretty much any reasonably solid surface, that doesn’t even have to be smooth. It wouldn’t even make very much draft so you wouldn’t be sitting in a dust cloud.

Propulsion would be by using a layer of electron pipes around the edge of the vehicle to thrust particles in any direction, so providing an impulse, reaction and hence movement. The forward-facing and side facing pipes would suck in air to strip the charge off with which to feed the charged air underneath. Remember that little air would be escaping so this would still be silent. Think of the surface as a flat sheet that pushes ionised air through quite fast using purely electromagnetic force.

Plan B would be to use the cover of electron pipes on the underside to create a strong downward air flow that would be smoothed and diffused by pipes doing the side cushion bit. Neither would be visible and spoil the appearance, and smooth flow could still be pretty quiet. I prefer plan A. It’s just neater.

There would be a little noise from the air turbulence created as the air flow for propulsion mixes with other air, but with a totally silent source of the air flow. So basically you’d hear some wind but not much else.

Production of the electron pipes is nicely biomimetic. Packing them closely together in the right pattern (basically the pattern they’d assume naturally if you just picked them up) and feeding carbon atoms with the right charge through them at the right intervals could let you 3D print a continuous sheet of graphene or carbon nanotube. Biomimetic since the tube would grow from the base continuously just like grass. You could even produce an extremely tall skyscraper that way. 30km is a reasonable limit for 2045, but recent figures for graphene strength suggest that structures up to 600km may be theoretically possible by the end of the century.

Could it work. Yes, I think so. I haven’t built a prototype but intuitively it should be feasible. Back to the Future Part 1 takes Marty to Oct 21, 2015. We just passed that and two prototypes hoverboards were available then. Sadly, neither used my technique but a good lab could just about make most and maybe all of this capability any time soon. On the other hand, Star Wars is set very far away and very long ago, so we’re a bit late for that one.

So, feasible, and just a little way in the future. Pretty much the entire vehicle could be carbon based. Carbon fibre and carbon foam would provide most of the structure, graphene windows for streamlining, strength, protection and transparency, graphene and carbon nanotubes for engines, power and levitation.