MIT engineers fabricate a forest of ’white graphene’ nanotubes (shown here patterned as MIT) by burning away a scaffold of black carbon. Credits : Image: Courtesy of the researchers
MIT engineers fabricate a forest of 'white graphene' nanotubes (shown here patterned as MIT) by burning away a scaffold of black carbon. Credits : Image: Courtesy of the researchers - A technique for synthesizing many "white graphene" nanotubes at a time paves the way for stronger, heat-resistant composites, and membranes for renewable energy. Engineers at MIT and the University of Tokyo have produced centimeter-scale structures, large enough for the eye to see, that are packed with hundreds of billions of hollow aligned fibers, or nanotubes, made from hexagonal boron nitride. Hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN, is a single-atom-thin material that has been coined "white graphene" for its transparent appearance and its similarity to carbon-based graphene in molecular structure and strength. It can also withstand higher temperatures than graphene, and is electrically insulating, rather than conductive. When hBN is rolled into nanometer-scale tubes, or nanotubes, its exceptional properties are significantly enhanced. The team's results, published today in the journal ACS Nano , provide a route toward fabricating aligned boron nitride nanotubes (A-BNNTs) in bulk.
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