NewswireToday - /newswire/ - Honolulu, HI, United States, 10/30/2006 - The study of very thin structural foams for cushioning and energy dissipation is, now more than ever, of primary importance in the engineering world, for example for the protection of electronic gadgets (such as MP3 players, cell phones, PDAs, etc.)..

The advancement in the controlled growth of carbon nanotubes and other nanostructures has allowed researchers to create improved systems designed accurately for specific engineering applications.

Carbon nanotubes in particular have been well known to the scientific community for over 15 years now (they have been defined as the most popular teenagers in science). Thanks to their fascinating properties they are beginning to be used or considered for a variety of electronics and biomedical applications such as sensors, actuator devices, displays, batteries, drug delivery and other miniaturized devices.

The creation of well controlled carpets of vertically aligned and uniformly coiled carbon nanotubes by Dr. Wei Wang (then a graduate student at Clemson University) supervised by Prof. Apparao Rao might now extend new horizons for applications in the nanoworld. They were able to grow very uniform foam-like forests of coiled carbon nanotubes in a thermal CVD reactor with controlled thickness and uniform coils diameter (~20 nm) and coiling pitch (∼500 nm). This relatively defect free structures showed the potential for developing active nanospring devices, as well as protective coatings, when used in their as grown dense foam-like form.

Dynamic studies of these aligned forests of nanocoils have been recently developed at the Materials Science and Engineering Program at UCSD at the University of California, San Diego in the groups of Prof. Vitali Nesterenko and Sungho Jin, by Chiara Daraio, then a graduate student at UCSD. The analysis has resulted in exciting new findings published in a recent paper titled "Impact response by a foamlike forest of coiled carbon nanotubes", published online on the 22 September issue of the Journal of Applied Physics.

Read the full article on the Nanowerk website.

About Nanowerk: Nanowerk is a leading nanotechnology information portal. Apart from its unique Nanomaterial Database™, with over 1,300 products from 90 suppliers, it provides the most complete nanotech events calendar; hundreds of links to universities, labs, researchers, associations, networks and international initiatives involved in nanotechnology; daily news; downloadable reports; and much more. The site includes a daily “Spotlight” section featuring Nanowerk-exclusive reviews and summaries of cutting-edge nanotechnology research by guest authors and Nanowerk editors. Nanowerk also publishes the nanoRISK newsletter – a constructive contribution to the debate about the potential risks of nanotechnology.

Agency / Source: Nanowerk, LLC

Availability: All Regions (Including Int'l)

Traffic Booster: [/] Quick Newswire Today Visibility Checker

Distribution / Indexing: [+]