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Nanotube Safety Test: Because Plastics Aren’t What They Used to Be
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장바울
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2014-03-22 01:54:16, 조회 : 1,982 |
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Nanotube Safety Test: Because Plastics Aren’t What They Used to Be
Today’s incredibly resilient plastic products could turn out to be tomorrow’s environmental nightmare. Researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are now devising tests to help them predict the future safety (or hazard) of plastics enhanced with carbon nanotubes.
Heat, humidity, and sunlight are the key ingredients for breaking down epoxies in the environment, so the NIST team sought to simulate an “artificial Florida” test to evaluate the performance of nanocomposites (epoxies containing multiwalled carbon nanotubes).
The test chamber, dubbed SPHERE (Simulated Photodegradation via High Energy Radiant Exposure), exposes the materials to powerful ultraviolet light, high temperatures (50°C), and high humidity (75%). A hundred days in these conditions is the equivalent of exposing the materials to four years in the Florida sun.
The researchers found that the exposure to UV light degraded the epoxies in the nanocomposites, but that the carbon nanotubes were less damaged. This doesn’t mean that nanotubes last forever, but the scientists gained new insights about them.
\"We got a lot of new information from the test suite about how nanocomposites degrade,\" says NIST researcher Elijah Petersen,\" and the most encouraging thing is that the results of the different tests generally back one another up.\"
This is good news for the manufacturers of products ranging from baseball bats and tennis rackets to bikes and airplanes. —Cynthia G. Wagner
Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Material Measurement Laboratory
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