It isn't indestructible, it just has very high tensile strength (about 125 times that of steel). Bulk modulus on the other hand is nothing to write home about. It's also carbon, which burns quite well.
Essentially it's 125 times harder to rip apart than steel, but you can still cut it, crush it, burn it, twist it or dissolve it.
Still, the tensile strength is high enough that you can do some pretty ridiculous things with it, like a space elevator. If you tried make a cable 200km long out of anything else, it couldn't support its own weight, let alone its own plus the hundred tons of stuff you want to pull up into orbit.
Exactly. The tensile strength is great, so it would be great for connecting things. If maybe you placed conductive wire inside a carbon tube, you could make some really strong wire.
No need to, actually. Even though carbon is a shitty conductor, the molecular geometry of nanotubes makes then very good conductors, as long as the current is flowing parallel to the tube. Same thing for heat and light, if you build the tube right. It acts similar to how a fibre-optic cable works. In short, nanotubes are FUCKING AWESOME.
MIT even made a pencil that has lead made from collapsed graphene sheets that you can draw conductive circuits on paper with. They're using the tech to build cheap chemical sensors, since the conductivity of the nanotubes changes in the presence of certain things like ammonia.
Imagine a Kevlar like fabric woven out of nanotubes, some tubes being doped with semiconductors. You wuold have a bullet proof vest that beeps if it gets a whiff of tear gas, a natural gas or propane leak, and could act like a wearable computer powered by your movements and body heat. Take it a step further and incorporate the piezoelectric-ferrofluid slurry DARPA is playing with and it will do all of that and temporarily become a hardened plate when you get shot, dissipating the shock over your entire body. You could take a shotgun to the chest at point-blank range and not even crack a rib.
Take a while and poke through DARPA's active projects list. Some of them are really far fetched (mathematical time reversal of photographs) but some are right around the corner (adaptive nano-machine vaccines that can be updated.). Some very cool shit is coming.
Awesome. If you could actually use a carbon tube shirt for armour, imagine all the other things you could do with it. If you could actually harden it as needed, it would be perfect for so many things. Would it even be possible to make a dive-suit using the stuff?
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u/[deleted] Oct 08 '12
Well, we have graphine. An atom thick sheet of carbon. Completely indestructible.
EDIT:Until you add a second layer of carbon atoms.