2 The technique could have a signicant impact on the commercialization of nanowires, according to Charles M. Lieber of Harvard University.

Given the great diversity of functional properties demonstrated previously by nanowire materials, the capability of this new aerotaxy to be applied to a broad class of nanowire materials offers great promise for commercial applications as the methodology could be easily used for continuous, large scale synthesis, he told Nano Today. It is very likely that this new approach could open up new synthetic directions to create more complex and functional nanowires not possible using traditional substrate-based synthesis. Brian A. Korgel of the University of Texas at Austin agrees that aerotaxy will serve as an inspiration for the

C. Sealy development of high throughput manufacturing for semiconductor nanowires. This is really important for achieving the manufacturing scale needed for many applications, such as photocatalysts for solar fuels applications, new kinds of polymer/nanowire composites and even fabrics or textiles made of semiconductor nanowires with new combinations of mechanical, optical and electrical properties, he says. Samuelson suggests the aerotaxy technique could be ready for commercialisation in as little as two to four years time, with a prototype ready for solar cells in two years time. E-mail address: cordelia.sealy@googlemail.com
1748-0132/$ see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2012.12.007

Carbon nanotubes spin a new yarn on articial muscles

Cordelia Sealy

Articial muscles based on smart materials which change size or shape when stimulated could form the basis of a new generation of robotics or sensing and control functions. But so far these materials have tended to have low efciency, require an electrolyte or only provide a large amount of force with little movement or larger motions with less force. Now researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, Nankai University in China, Hanyang University in South Korea, University of Wollongong in Australia, State University of Campinas and Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil, and the University of British Columbia in Canada have fabricated a new type of articial muscle the diameter of a human hair. The carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns infused with parafn wax deliver both great strength and speed of motion [M.D. Lima, et al., Science 338 (2012) 928]. These actuating materials, which convert a stimuli like light, electricity, heat or even a chemical trigger into a twisting or tensile motion, use the expansion of the parafn wax or other volume-changing guest material to drive the movement. When the parafn, which is stuck or conned to the nanosized pores in the multi-walled carbon nanotubes, is exposed to heat, voltage or a ash of light, it expands and drives a volume increase in the yarn that in turn contracts the yarn length. The combination of the volume increase with the length decrease is produced by the twisted, helical nature of the yarn, which is formed by twist-spinning the nanotubes together (Fig. 1). The strength of the articial muscles is remarkable: a two-end tethered, wax-lled yarn can lift 17,700 times its own weight for over a million cycles. The researchers also report a yarn able to lift 175,000 times its own weight in

30 ms equivalent to 85 times the peak output of the best mammalian skeletal muscles and 30 times greater the previously highest recorded CNT muscles. The articial muscles that weve developed can provide large, ultrafast contractions to lift weights that are 200 times heavier than possible for a natural muscle of the same size, says lead researcher Ray H. Baughman. Because of their simplicity and high performance, these yarn muscles could be used for such diverse applications as robots, catheters for minimally invasive surgery, micromotors, mixers for microuidic circuits, tunable optical systems, microvalves, positioners and even toys. Baughman believes that small actuators based on the hybrid CNT yarns, which are extraordinarily simple to make he says, could be commercialized in a few years, with

Figure 1 Articial muscles made from CNT yarns inltrated with parafn wax and twisted until coils form along their length. The diameter of this coiled yarn is about twice the width of a human hair. (Credit: Ray H. Baughman, University of Texas at Dallas.).

News and opinions more advanced applications as smart textiles or in robotics to follow. Richard Vaia of the Air Force Research Laboratory says the work is an excellent example of a combination of clever choice of materials with structure design to create novel properties. These concepts have the potential to go beyond current state-of-the-art design due to the synergy arising from the hierarchical material-structure design, he says. Vaia cautions that the CNT yarn-based articial muscles will be limited by the fundamental electro-thermal

3 transduction mechanism. But he suggests that they could nd applications in particular niches like satellites where a structural framework has to be packaged for delivery and unpacked for service or, for example, to replace hydraulic systems in aircraft design, where an electrically driven actuator would have advantages in weight, reliability, and maintenance. E-mail address: cordelia.sealy@googlemail.com
1748-0132/$ see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2012.12.006

Dislocations deform even the smallest nanoparticles

Cordelia Sealy

The plasticor permanentdeformation of metals depends on the nucleation and motion of dislocations. That motion of dislocationsor glideis mediated by what happens at the grain boundaries within a material. Understanding and controlling glidewhich causes crystalline rotation or textureis a major effort in materials science and engineering but can be difcult. Now researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; University of Nevada; Southern University; the Carnegie Institution of Washington; and the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Shanghai, China, used Berkeleys Advanced Light Source (ALS) Beamline to put pressure on Ni nanocrystals with a

radial diamond anvil cell (rDAC) and x-ray diffraction to see what happens in situ (Fig. 1). Analysis of nanoparticles of 500 nm, 20 nm, and 3 nm diameter yielded the surprising result that the smallest nanocrystals show evidence of dislocation-mediated deformation under high external pressures (Fig. 1). At pressures as low as 3.0 GPa, large 500 nm Ni grains exhibit substantial texturing, indicating dislocation glide. Smaller 20 nm grains also show texturing but at higher pressures of 11.0 GPa. But what was unexpected was that the smallest grains of 3 nm also developed texture at pressures above 18.0 GPa. Our results demonstrate that dislocation-mediated deformation persists to smaller crystal sizes than

Figure 1 Radial diamond-anvil cell (rDAC) x-ray diffraction setup for in situ high pressure texturing measurements. (Image courtesy of Bin Chen and NDT Education Resource Center.)