Don’t look for carbon nanotube fashions on Parisian catwalks anytime soon. The costs are too prohibitive.



“We’re working with clients who care more about performance than cost. But once we perfect synthesis, scale goes up considerably and costs should drop accordingly,” Haase said. “Then we’ll see carbon nanotubes spread to many, many more applications.”



For now, UC’s lab can produce about 50 yards of carbon nanotube thread at a time for its research.



“Most large-scale textile machines need miles of thread,” Haase said. “We’ll get there.”



Until then, mass production remains one of the bigger unresolved problems for carbon nanotube technology, said Benji Maruyama, who leads the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory.



“There is still a lot of work to be done in scaling up the process. Pulling a carbon nanotube fiber off a silicon disk is good for lab-scale research but not for making an airplane wing or flight suit,” Maruyama said.



“The only thing holding us back is cracking the code on making carbon nanotubes at scale,” he said.



Maruyama is trying to solve that problem with a series of experiments he is conducting using an autonomous research robot called ARES. The robot designs and conducts experiments with carbon nanotubes, analyzes the results and then uses that data and artificial intelligence to redefine parameters for the next experiment. In this way, it can conduct 100 times as many experiments in the same time as human researchers, he said.



“The big advantage of carbon nanotubes is there’s no shortage of materials. It just requires a metal catalyst – we use iron and nickel – and carbon. It’s not scarce,” Maruyama said. “So when we’re talking about making millions of tons per year of carbon nanotubes, we’re not making millions of tons of something rare.”



The ultimate goal is to convert UC’s academic research into solutions to real problems, Shanov said.



“We have the luxury in academia to explore different applications,” Shanov said. “Not all of them may see the market. But even if 10 percent hit, it would be a great success.”