Before launching into this latest item about carbon nanotubes (CNTs), I have an April 11, 2013 posting which offers a brief overview of the topic and a link to my Mar. 14, 2013 posting titled: The long, the short, the straight, and the curved of them: all about carbon nanotubes, which holds an embedded video by Dr. Andrew Maynard where he describes their somewhat ‘unruly’ nature.
These postings will help those unfamiliar with carbon nanotubes to better understand the importance of a June 14, 2014 news item on Nanowerk announcing a new CNT characterization and certification service for single-walled CNTs,
Intertek, a leading quality solutions provider to industries worldwide, today announced a comprehensive facility for characterising key structural and quality parameters of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs).
A June 12, 2014 Intertek press release, which originated the news item, describes the company’s reasons for adding this to their suite of services,
Carbon nanotubes are very thin tubes of elemental carbon with exceptional mechanical, optical and electrical properties that have the potential to significantly improve the performance of a wide range of materials by altering their fundamental properties. Recent advancements in manufacturing processes mean that SWNTs are now becoming available in sufficient quantity for industrial-scale evaluation and application and so it is increasingly important to be able to verify their quality though robust analytical testing. Applications currently being explored include additives for batteries, composites for the automotive and aerospace industry, electrodes and semiconductor devices such as transistors.
With dimensions of approximately 1/100000th the thickness of a single human hair, SWNTs can present analytical challenges for assessing their quality and structure. No single technique can adequately characterise a nanotube product, and so a diverse set of complementary analytical techniques which have exquisite precision and sensitivity are required. This comprehensive analytical service is commercially available to both manufacturers of nanotubes and to developers who wish to incorporate nanotubes into their products.
It seems to me this is a necessary step on the road to commercializing products utilizing single-walled CNTs.