by Citation News Editor
19. October 2011
A team of researchers from Australia, the US, Canada and South Korea have demonstrated motors consisting of yarns made of nanotubes, i.e, tiny straws of carbon atoms linked together in hexagons. The motors could spin at nearly 600 revolutions per minute and turn a weight 2,000 times heavier than the yarn itself. The yarns are made of billions of nanotubes, each 1/100,000 times narrower than a human hair, which are then dipped into an electrolyte solution. Passing current through the yarn then causes it to twist much like the muscle of an elephant trunk or the tentacles of a squid. The yarns would be practical in microfluidics, where they would be used for chemical analysis or for sensing.
