ROBOTS may one day do their work using muscles made from sheets of tangled
nanotubes. Geoff Spinks at the University of Wollongong in Australia has
discovered that sheets of the tiny carbon tubes can be made to contract and
relax by applying a voltage to them.
Spinks’s team was investigating the properties of nanotube mats—which
are made by straining a solution of nanotubes through a fine filter. Filtering
deposits the nanotubes in tangled layers, which then stay stuck together due to
intermolecular van der Waals forces.
Spinks was checking an effect whereby nanotube mats immersed in water appear
to…
