us air force reveals plans for 'iron man' flight suits that use carbon fiber to store power - power storage devices
The Air Force Research Lab is working with engineers at the University of Cincinnati to develop new outfits that can charge phones.
Researchers are developing a lot of carbon technology, including the "Iron Man" package that can store energy in carbon nanotubes.
They say the technology can completely change everything from clothing to fighter jets.
Scroll down for cameras to "grow" nanotubes on quarter
Through a process called chemical vapor deposition, a silicon wafer of a size is heated in a vacuum chamber.
They then stretch this small fiber square on an industrial spool in the lab, turning tiny carbon sheets into a thin thread similar to spider silk that can be woven into textiles.
Vesselin Shanov, a professor at the University of California, said it was like a textile.
The head of the University of California's Nanoworld lab said.
"We can assemble them like machine threads and use them for sensors to track heavy metals in water or energy storage devices, including super capacitors and batteries.
For the military, this could mean replacing heavy batteries that charge more and more electronic devices that make up the load of soldiers: lights, nights --
Visual and communication equipment. Like
Graduate student Mark Hasse says the third of the weight they carry is the battery that powers all their equipment. For the past year, he has been exploring the application of carbon nanotubes at Wright Air Force Research Laboratory. Said Patterson.
So even if we can reduce it a little bit, it's a big advantage for them.
However, the technology is still too expensive to be widely used.
We work with customers who care more about performance than cost.
Haase said, but once we have improved the synthesis, the scale will increase significantly and the cost will decrease accordingly.
We will then see the expansion of carbon nanotubes into more applications.
Now, the University of California's laboratory can produce about 50 yards of carbon nano-pipelines at a time for research. 'Most large-
The scale textile machines need miles of lines, Haase said.
We will go.
"There is still a lot of work to be done to expand this process," said Benji Maruyama, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory materials and manufacturing Bureau.
Pulling Carbon Nanotubes fiber out of the silicon disk is good for the laboratory
Maruyama said the scale study was not intended to make aircraft wings or flight suits.
The only thing that makes us flinch, he says, is to crack the code to make carbon nanotubes on a large scale.
Maruyama, who is trying to solve the problem through a series of experiments, is experimenting with an autonomous research robot called ARES.
The robot uses carbon nanotubes to design and experiment, analyze the results, and then re-define the parameters for the next experiment using these data and artificial intelligence.
In this way, he says, it can do 100 times more experiments at the same time as human researchers.
There are five College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California
Reached an agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory to conduct research that can enhance the application of military technology.