You jest, but that’s exactly the goal. Spinning nanotubes into yarn.

I should elaborate.

This gossamer black lace is a mass of pure carbon nanotubes.  Maybe four of five minutes worth of production.  It pours out of the furnace tube (the hole on the left) as a sort of sheer “sock.”  This particular batch got all clumped up, rather than being drawn into the spindle.  Whoops.

Once that happens you’re kind of screwed.  CNT’s cling to themselves real hard, and it takes something like chlorosulfonic acid to break them apart.  It’s like crushing a ball of cotton candy.  If you want to spin them into yarn, you have to do it quickly, as soon as they come out the tube.

Here’s an early prototype spinning rig.  You can see the “sock” being spun down into a cone on the left, and then a thin fiber through the middle, before it’s wound up on a spool on the right.  This specific rig was a failure. It produced extremely loose, clumpy yarn, but good CNT yarn is extremely strong, as well as electrically conductive.  Tensile strength measured in tens or hundreds of gigapascals.

Boron nitride nanotubes are white, and much harder to produce – as you can see above, they tend to come out as dusty cobwebs, rather than a cohesive sock. But. BNNT yarn is even stronger than CNT.  As much as a terapascal, theoretically.  Also an electrical insulator, thermally stable up to a couple thousand °C, and a good neutron absorber to boot, given that it’s half boron.

So, what can you make with nanotube yarn?  That’s such a small question.  It’s like asking what you can make with iron.  Spin it into thread, into rope, into fabric.  Build a spacesuit or a space elevator, wrap it around a reactor core, transmission wires, ultra-strong cables.  Whatever you want.

I don’t work at this company anymore – I got extremely sick, and it was a bit of a nightmare workplace anyway – but I still dream of nanotubes.  Give me fifty thousand dollars and a garage, and I can start churning out decent CNT tape by the kilometer.  Yarn is trickier, I might need to finally do a PhD for that.

But CNT’s are so easy.  It’s like they want to exist.  We built a synthesis machine and it worked on the first try.  I need to try again.