Vanguard Magazine

T TECHNOLOGY www.vanguardcanada.com OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015 19 Unorganized carbon "bulk" nanotubes, for example, are regularly used in a variety of applications for sports, medicine and industrial manufacturing. Program at NRC, where they use nano- materials to make advanced composites for defence and military applications like improved armour for vehicles and people. Nanomaterials, for the uninitiated, are defined by Stanford as "materials with at least one external dimension in the size range from approximately 1-100 nano- meters." One nanometer, as a unit of measurement, is one-billionth of a me- tre. A sheet of paper is 100,000 nanome- ters thick, and a human hair is 80,000 – 100,000 nanometers wide. It's tough to tell, at least from looking around the lab, what actually happens here. The place is spotless. And the two story-machine, which looks kind of like a cross between an oversized funnel and a prop from Back to the Future, gives noth- ing away. Kingston produces a small sample of carbon-based nanomaterials in a clear plastic case in preparation for an explana- tion which he knows will be tough for a journalist with an arts background and no high-school chemistry credits. It looks like black baby powder or a collection of soot from a well-used woodstove. Over time, he explains, scientists have become adept at engineering nanomate- rials to improve their strength, reactivity and electrical properties. At the NRC, Kingston and Simard work mainly with carbon and boron nitride nanomateri- als, which they further process into ex- ceptionally strong, cylindrical structures called nanotubes. While nanotubes may not make the front page of the New York Times on a regular basis, they play a pretty big part in our everyday life, and have for quite some time. Unorganized carbon "bulk" nano- tubes, for example, are regularly used in a variety of applications for sports, medi- cine and industrial manufacturing. For Kingston and Simard, carbon nano- tubes are old hat. Been there. Done that. But Boron Nitride? They're like 12-year- old girls at a Justin Bieber concert. Kings- ton says that boron nitride nanotubes, or BNNTs, as the cool kids call them, have "fantastic mechanical properties." In fact, he claims, they are "almost hundreds of times better" than any standard engineer- ing material already in use. "Steel, alumi- num, polymers – the strength-to-weight properties are almost through the roof," he says, emphatically. There's another benefit too, one that Kingston thinks will appeal to the defence industry. Anyone who is familiar with car- bon knows that everything it is made with comes out black. BNNTs, on the other hand, have many of the same mechanical properties as carbon nanotubes, but can be placed into transparent composites, improving their hardness, toughness and fracture resistance. "With boron nitride nanotubes, you can make better, lighter, higher-performance transparent materials for armoured vehicles," Kingston says. "Now you can have high visibility in ve- hicles that offer just as much protection." He lists off some other attributes; bo- ron nitride nanotubes are also very light and have excellent electrical properties. "If you can harness all of these proper- ties in different ways," Kingston explains, "then the opportunities for composite materials are almost…" he pauses. "Well, almost any industry could benefit, but of course, defence is a key market for a lot of these advanced materials." Before catching BNNT fever like Kings- ton and Simard, here's the bad news: BNNTs have been known for decades,

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