Carbon nanotubes are exceptionally strong, but when you roll two that fit together, the engineers believe they’ve got a nanomotor.
Image: Nature
Ray Kurzweil – an author, computer scientists, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google – has once been quoted saying, “In 25 years, a computer that’s the size fo your phone will be millions of times more powerful but will be the size of a blood cell.”
That prediction may be on its way to fruition with this new discovery from engineers in China and Australia.
The engineers have developed a double-walled carbon nanotube motor, which could be a huge player in future nanotechnology devices.
The new device takes advantage of graphene, which creates a carbon nanotube when the material is rolled into a tiny tube.
For this development, engineers found a way to roll two of these exceptionally strong nanotubes together to create a nanomtor.
The nanomotor is able to function as a motor because at the atomic level, the Van der Walls interaction occurs, which causes the nanotube to spin.
You can check out exactly how this nanmotor works by watching the following video from Discovery News:
Looking for more information on nanotechnology? Read the latest research here. And check out all of the latest peer-reviewed research published in our Digital Library.
