Nanotubes assemble! Rice introduces Teslaphoresis
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TRANSCRIPT
Paul Cherukuri
What we’ve designed – and we’ve done this very, very
quietly, but uhm we’re glad
to now release it to the world – is this idea of Teslaphoresis, which
is a
discovery we made several years ago, and we’ve
been
developing it.
And Teslaphoresis is … the simplest way to understand it
is self-assembly
at
a distance, just long-distance
assembly of … of materials.
And what we did was – because we’re at Rice [University] we had plenty
of nanotubes around – so we uh
decided to use nanotubes. And what we discovered was that these
nanotubes
can actually string together
and form wires by themselves under this electric field.
Carter Kittrell
This fundamental idea uh
of force acting at a distance, that you can have instead of, you know,
when you normally build circuits and things like that, you have to
have physical contact. Now we’re talking about building circuits without actually
touching them.
Voice of a scientist (heard talking during the setting up
of their Teslaphoresis generator):
Right? Just dispersing this.
Voice of another scientist.
Power on. And up.
Paul Cherukuri
And then I realised that a Tesla
coil could actually do this, if
you designed it in a way to create a very
strong force field in front of it. And so that
was the engineering aspect of it. And then once I designed the
machine, then all sorts of discoveries started falling out of it.
Voice of a scientist
Oh, that was a good one.
Lindsey Bornhoeft
Teslaphoresis is one of those things – it’s a project
that … there are just so many avenues, so many things that I think you
could do with it, not just making
conductive
wires, but taking it in so many different places, not only just
biomedical engineering and … but taking
it into different industries like silicon chips or uhm exploring different conductive materials.
Carter Kittrell
This also ties in just generally, in nanotechnology, that
self-assembly is very big – that is, if you can get things to build
themselves, just as in biology, and we
build ourselves.
Paul Cherukuri
When my son saw it, he called them webs. You know, he
thought it was like Spiderman shooting
webs out. And it really is. It’s very much like a web, sort of stringing out
together, and that was a surprising finding. And the
physics of that is actually a lot richer than what we had originally
thought. So there is new science coming out of this as we go.
The description provided by Rice University reads as
follows:
Carbon nanotubes in a dish assemble themselves into a
nanowire in seconds under the influence of a custom-built Tesla coil
created by scientists at Rice University.
But the scientists don’t limit their aspirations for the
phenomenon they call Teslaphoresis to simple nanowires.
The team led by Rice research scientist Paul Cherukuri
sees its invention as setting a path toward the assembly of matter
from the bottom up on nano and macro scales.
There are even hints of a tractor beam effect in watching
an assembled nanowire being pulled toward the coil.
Read more at https://news.rice.edu/news/2016/nanotubes-assemble-rice-introduces-teslaphoresis
Some links
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.6b02313
https://www.designnews.com/alternative-energy/so-whats-teslaphoresis-and-how-can-it-make-self-assembling-circuits/94691254846621
https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/14/teslaphoresis-activated-self-assembling-carbon-nanotubes-look-even-cooler-than-they-sound
https://www.evolving-science.com/matter-energy-materials/teslaphoresis-and-self-assembly-carbon-nanotubes-00212
Some books
- George Trinkaus, Tesla Coil, 3rd ed., High Voltage
Press, Portland, OR, 1989
-
Tesla Coil: 500,000 volt lightning Generator,
FuellessPower.com, 2003
-
Mitch Tilbury, The ULTIMATE Tesla Coil Design and
Construction Guide, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2008
- K.R. Scott, Bipolar Tesla Coils - Experimenter’s Guide,
Willow-Tech Publishing, 2016
Lausanne, the lines above were posted on
the twenty-eighth day of the sixth month of the year two thousand and
twenty-two.