Mark Bowers, a consultant in Arup’s advanced technology and research group, has spent several years exploring the potential applications of nanotechnology in the built environment. I spoke to him about his work.
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What does your research involve?
We’re looking at how nanocarbon technologies, things like graphene and nanocarbon tubes, can be applied in the construction industry.
No one ever anticipated there to be much use for them in our industry. All the research is geared toward small electronics — flexible display stuff, flexible batteries. Cool stuff, but not useful to us. So our aim is to find where these technologies can be used and how we can go about implementing them.
Can you give an example of some of the potential applications that are being considered?
Graphene, because it’s only one atom thick, is never going to be an actual structural material. But as a coating technology it could be very powerful, either for corrosion protection systems or high-performance coatings on glass to shield out UV, give extremely good reflectiveness properties, and things like that.
Or using nanotubes to give super strength to materials. An example of something that’s already been done is super-strength foamed aluminium. Foamed aluminium is nothing new; that’s where you just blow gas through aluminium when it’s molten. It’s hard to build with, because it’s not necessarily the strongest thing and is inconsistent through its cross section. But by using these nanotubes you can alleviate the concern about the strength. We’re looking to use those in lightweight pylons.
Foamed aluminum.
How does your group decide what areas of research that we should be involved in?
This one was quite clear not just in our team but in wider Arup. Graphene is billed as the strongest material in the world. That’s quite misleading, maybe, but it does have incredible properties, be it structural properties like strength and stiffness or electromagnetic properties — you can make ultra-conductive materials because of its conductivity. There’s a lot of hype around it, but even when you get rid of all that, there’s a lot of truth said about what these things are. It was really a no-brainer to think, “How can we apply this?
When we started to dig deeper into the business benefit, it became very clear very quickly that no one had looked at this. And obviously that is a massive window of opportunity. There are something like 55 patents made every day related to nanocarbon technologies. But the amount of those that are in things that interest Arup is probably less than 1%. So we’re trying to capitalize on being the first people to dive into it.
What has this research process involved?
We got introduced to an international consortium by a company called National Grid, a British power transport authority. We went along as a reconnaissance exercise to see what they were talking about and if there was any place for us. And it was clear there was, so we joined it. We kind of said, “These are the problems we have in our industry. Can nanocarbon technologies help any of them?” Everyone’s eyes lit up they and were like, “We haven’t thought of this. Why haven’t we thought of this?”
We’ve done our own research, and through contacts we’ve made there with research institutes and other companies we’ve started to develop product ideas. That led on to us doing a patenting exercise. We’ve started seven patents to do with these technologies, and we’ve used this consortium as a vehicle for brainstorming these ideas.
How long have these technologies been around?
Carbon nanotubes are about a decade, maybe 12 years old now, and we’re starting to see things emerge from them. And graphene was only discovered in 2010 by accident. That is rapidly gaining ground, but we’re probably still five years from a proper product using it.
Single carbon nanotube.
The work we’re doing is not short-sighted; we’re working longer term. Maybe some of the things are shorter-term; the thing with patenting is that you have an idea, even if you only get a penny every time it’s used, if it’s actually something that’s used in everyday life then it quickly becomes a very viable business. One of our ideas is to do with insulated glazing units, and they are produced in the millions every year.
Is strength the main advantage of graphene and carbon nanotubes, or is it a range of things?
It’s a range of things. The main things we’re interested in are the strength qualities and electrical conductivity. But they also have thermal benefits. A lot of people say really silly things, like they’ll do anything you want, but that’s ridiculous — that’s kind of the hype that we have to see through.
How do you even work with anything that small?
We wouldn’t be doing any hands-on work ourselves. It has to be done in labs in very controlled conditions.
If you were to use these carbon nanotubes to cover something, they come as like a black powder. It literally just looks like dust. And they are really messy when you get them. They’re just all tangled up together, and then in a lab they can turn them from a mess like that into what looks like quite a neat spaghetti. They can even pull them into a long fibers, which they then wind together. The fibers are between 1 and 20 nanometers in width, which is tiny. The lab guy winds them together into a wire which he can then tie in knots. It doesn’t lose its connectivity properties or its tensile strength by putting a knot into it, which is another unique property to these materials.
And you said graphene was discovered by accident?
I think the best things are all done by accident. Yeah, they call it mechanical cleavage. Basically, they stuck a bit of sticky tape to a bit of graphite and it came off as one layer of graphite. They called it graphene. They tested it and realized that it had these incredible strength properties. And then they were like, “Right! A layer of graphite is very, very good.”
They’ve got new ways to get it now; it’s mainly done in gas chambers by a process called chemical vapor deposition. You don’t have to get sticky tape on your fingers.