Buckyballs are hollow spheres of Fullerenes, a carbon allotrope named after Buckminster Fuller. When they are “stretched” out into cylinders you call them carbon nanotubes, an extremely expensive to produce but incredibly strong (up to 500 times stronger than steel by volume) “holy grail” of material scientists.

It’s the stuff dreams are made of, if you happen to dream about spectacularly interesting cutting-edge materials. It could be used as armor plating, as a substrate to grow nerve cells, as a sensor to selectively target micro particles, and even in artificial muscles under the right conditions; scientists believe nanotubes can do just about everything and they’ve been working for the last 20 years to get them out of the lab.

Enter FSU and Buckypaper.

Engineers at FSU have developed a method of manufacturing thin sheets of carbon nanotubes (buckypaper) and they hope to be able to use them in everything from next generation body armor to airplanes. Especially in airplane design, buckypaper could not only increase the overall strength of the fuselage but also act as highly effective lightening strike and electromagnetic interference shielding.

The biggest problem facing these engineers is economic. Creating enough buckypaper to be applied commercially is expensive, expensive enough to make any large scale applications impossible. On top of that, you only get the full benefits of the buckypaper when it’s stacked as a composite, which would once again require larger samples than are currently available.

Engineers are confident that they will be able to solve these problems, and hope to be able to create commercial products from buckypaper ranging from more energy-efficient computer screens, to films that protect electronic circuits.

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