Every time an NHL slap shot results in a broken stick, the player loses more than a $300 piece of carbon composite. His team loses a scoring opportunity. That's why hockey teams are looking to nanotech to keep those sticks intact.

Even though carbon composite has propelled engineering to new realms of lightweight strength, carbon still comes with a weakness. But N12 Technologies' NanoStitch technology aims to use one of the smallest and toughest materials in the universe—nanotubes that are 50 times stronger than spider silk—to fix the problem, and hopes to get N12 tech into hockey sticks during this NHL season.

Brad Berkson, N12 CEO, says you can think of carbon nanotubes as akin to rebar, the metal rods embedded within concrete. "Concrete is good if you push, but not if you pull," he says. "We do the same thing for carbon fiber composite. A carbon fiber is very strong when you pull, but tends to be weak when you push on it. It tends to splinter and delaminate when it twists. We are, in essence, like rebar to reinforced concrete. We put a material that essentially makes the sheer properties much stronger. We oppose the forces that are trying to shatter it."

These hockey stick samples were fabricated and tested by N12's applications team, who works with their customers' product engineers to create a more lightweight product that can deliver faster shots and survive high-energy slashes. N12

N12 is now beyond the initial testing phases, as tests with stick manufacturers have demonstrated that the nanotubes could improve upon the composite sticks currently on the market. Carbon nanotubes offer a new element of strength, both in the large impacts, such as a slap shot, and in the much smaller impacts that happen over the routine course of the game to help a stick retain the "snap" and feel players desire, N12 says.

"Players are swapping sticks out because they don't quite feel right," says Ryan Williams, N12 CTO. "When they find a good stick, they want to keep it in the sweet spot. For the high-performance players, this is a stick they can keep in play longer."

Carbon nanotubes were first developed more than a decade ago at MIT, earning their creators a Nobel prize along the way. N12 launched in 2012 as a way to take this lab technology out of MIT and scale it to the industrial level, something the company hopes to do beyond hockey sticks.

The NanoStitch product adds toughness, impact resistance and fatigue tolerance in a lighter, thinner laminate. Stitching together layers made of trillions of precisely aligned nano-reinforcements between fiber piles improves the overall strength of a carbon composite without requiring an adjustment to the manufacturing process.

While most folks don't need a $1 million scanning microscope to simply view the product they create, N12 hopes this miniscule product moves quickly beyond the NHL. "The nanotube is the smallest thing known to man having the biggest impact in the sporting world," Berkson says. "It is kind of ironic."

Follow Tim Newcomb on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.

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