All wire the Same? Maybe not in future.
 

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67350,00.html
--
I.Care
Address fake
until the SPAM goes away

I.Care wrote:

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67350,00.html


hmm. We'd better define better! And with that hard to define effect
"mobility", I wouldn't bet the house on it.

It looks like the major advantage is the light weight.

Of course that may be somewhat negated by the other promise of carbon -
the carbon ribbon that will allow us to build a space elevator!

Will this make a difference in Audio?

The audio geeks will be able to make up stuff for years about this......


- Mike KB3EIA -

"I.Care" wrote in message
.net...
NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

Does this mean that the resistance per ft for nanotubes is 1/10th that of
copper?
Are they comparing this performance by weight or by volume of wire
("pound-for-pound", or "cross-sectional-area" )
Then we have to talk about tensile strength of this stuff for
supporting its own weight between trees to use as an antenna
Then ya gotta conjure up a way to solder the feedline to it. (or make
feedline out of it)

"Hal Rosser" wrote in message
...

"I.Care" wrote in message
.net...
NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

Does this mean that the resistance per ft for nanotubes is 1/10th that of
copper?
Are they comparing this performance by weight or by volume of wire
("pound-for-pound", or "cross-sectional-area" )
Then we have to talk about tensile strength of this stuff for
supporting its own weight between trees to use as an antenna
Then ya gotta conjure up a way to solder the feedline to it. (or make
feedline out of it)

If the resistance is 1/10th that of copper then it should be possible to
manufacture helical inductors with Qs approaching 10,000. Not only that,
but open wire transmission lines would have very low loss, therefore making
it feasable to feed antennas with very small electrical dimensions. How to
handle the votages involved would be something else!

Frank

You know--this almost sounds like science fiction to me--if I had not
already been witness to truth being stranger than fiction--I'd think, "FAT
CHANCE!"
However, my audio is fine, it does not need any improvement to please me
more... BUT, antennas are a different story, it will revolutionize them!!!
And, how about PC boards, your traces would only need to be 1/10 the size!
And, how about semi-conductors themselves???
etc, etc, etc....
The future only gets better and brighter....

Regards,
John

What evidence is there that they've defeated skin effect? If they
haven't, the advantage drops to the square root of the DC advantage
(e.g., a little more than 3:1 if the DC advantage is 10:1). Also, I
wonder if the bulk resistivity of these gadgets remains constant with
frequency like solid copper, or rises with frequency like
superconductors. If it rises with frequency, then the advantage becomes
less yet, potentially even becoming worse than copper at some frequency.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Frank wrote:
"Hal Rosser" wrote in message
...

"I.Care" wrote in message
st.net...

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

Does this mean that the resistance per ft for nanotubes is 1/10th that of
copper?
Are they comparing this performance by weight or by volume of wire
("pound-for-pound", or "cross-sectional-area" )
Then we have to talk about tensile strength of this stuff for
supporting its own weight between trees to use as an antenna
Then ya gotta conjure up a way to solder the feedline to it. (or make
feedline out of it)


If the resistance is 1/10th that of copper then it should be possible to
manufacture helical inductors with Qs approaching 10,000. Not only that,
but open wire transmission lines would have very low loss, therefore making
it feasable to feed antennas with very small electrical dimensions. How to
handle the votages involved would be something else!

Frank

Roy, you are a pessimist.

================================

"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
What evidence is there that they've defeated skin effect? If they
haven't, the advantage drops to the square root of the DC advantage
(e.g., a little more than 3:1 if the DC advantage is 10:1). Also, I
wonder if the bulk resistivity of these gadgets remains constant
with
frequency like solid copper, or rises with frequency like
superconductors. If it rises with frequency, then the advantage
becomes
less yet, potentially even becoming worse than copper at some
frequency.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Frank wrote:
"Hal Rosser" wrote in message
...

"I.Care" wrote in message
st.net...

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10
times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

Does this mean that the resistance per ft for nanotubes is 1/10th
that of
copper?
Are they comparing this performance by weight or by volume of wire
("pound-for-pound", or "cross-sectional-area" )
Then we have to talk about tensile strength of this stuff for
supporting its own weight between trees to use as an antenna
Then ya gotta conjure up a way to solder the feedline to it. (or
make
feedline out of it)


If the resistance is 1/10th that of copper then it should be
possible to
manufacture helical inductors with Qs approaching 10,000. Not
only that,
but open wire transmission lines would have very low loss,
therefore making
it feasable to feed antennas with very small electrical
dimensions. How to
handle the votages involved would be something else!

Frank

ONLY if his caution in accepting this notion is proven wrong is it
pessimism... otherwise it is wisdom!!! grin

Warmest regards,
John

Reg Edwards wrote:
Roy, you are a pessimist.

In my career doing electronic instrumentation product development, I
learned to look for all the potential problems I could think of, as
early as possible. A lot of them turned out to be non-problems, and
could then be ignored. But the ones which were real had to be overcome,
or at least had to have a good probility of being overcome, before the
project could proceed. If it couldn't be, another approach usually had
to be found or the project abandoned -- or at the very least an
alternative approach had to be identified in case the problem couldn't
be overcome. Too often, a naive ("optimistic") project manager wouldn't
do this, and would run into a project-killing problem 90% of the way
into the project. That can be a disaster, and I've seen it happen many
times. Of course, it's ok to go into a project knowing there's a
potential program-stopper, as long as you know it up front and are
willing to accept the consequences if it can't be overcome. This is the
approach often taken by startup companies, but the high risk of failure
is too often conceled from the suckers, um, investors. A great number of
announcements of revolutionary technology tend to ignore, deny, or
minimize potential problems, limitations, and risks. So I don't consider
it pessimistic at all to assume they exist. Once in a while, the serious
problems are overcome and a new and useful technology emerges. More
often, nothing emerges but a lot of investors with thinner wallets and
more critical outlooks.

I really hope the nano-tubes will bring us amazingly high Q coils. Then
all we'll have to do is figure out how to keep them far away from
anything else. Gee, maybe some new magical field-masking technology will
emerge in the nick of time to solve that problem. There, was that better?

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

"Reg Edwards" wrote in message
...
Roy, you are a pessimist.

Roy has a point.The article was very sparse with real fact, but rich in
speculation and totally void of specifications.
They were working on a 3 ft piece of this conductor for testing - so they
didn't have their eye on making a dipole for 160m - more than likely. :-)

For NASA to hand that off to a college with an initial eleven-million dollar
grant, I'd speculate that they have already confirmed the effect in
question...
I am thinking they are now working on producing it in sufficient quantities
and dimensions to make it applicable to practical use...
Indeed, it looks like the length they have in mind will reach space--if so,
that monopole will make a good muli-wavelength antenna for ultra-lowfers!!!
Perhaps it will be naturally resonant at the Shuman frequency and Earth
itself will begin to CQ DX! grin

Regards,
John

One more thing, when you start swinging a wire around in a magnetic
field--you begin to generate a current and voltage/power... although the
Earth's magnetic field will be moving with the wire, and so produce little
or no effect (there are "wobbles" in this planets magnetic field of course)
there surely must be some kind of magnetic field from the sun and/or other
planets which reach Earth--"free energy?"

The circumference of the Earth is 25,000+ miles and it does one revolution
in 24 hrs--unless I am mistaken that wire will be "whirling" at greater than
1,000 mph--if nothing else, a wire spinning at that speed sounds impressive,
especially when you figure in it will be a superior conductor!!!



I seem to remember one of the shuttle missions letting out a very long
tether--it, somewhat, "mysteriously" burnt or severed--and, if I remember
correctly, they noted a large current in the tether they did not expect....
perhaps someone else remembers this incident more clearly?





Regards,
John

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 18:08:52 -0700, I.Care wrote:

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

Only to those who sincerely wish while closing their eyes very, very
hard.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67350,00.html

An OK general announcement that is rather a hodge-podge of facts and
characteristics. Wired is hardly a cutting edge science venue. One
particular howler is the construction of a "quantum wire" from a
wrapping of several many nanotubes. This is a contradiction in terms.
The nanotubes are already quantum wires, in fact they are called 1D
forms.

Being "quantum" anything, they are consistent in exhibiting non-linear
electrical/physical properties. Ohms law (being yet another model
that those who lambaste models would be surprised to learn) fails to
uniquely express what resistance this wire would exhibit (Onsager's
Relation drawn as a Landauer curve). However in conductance
measurements, carbon nanotubes will support a billion Amperes per
square centimeter.

However, no carbon nanotube is a square centimeter, being more often
10s of nanometers in diameter, they are still not square (area)
defined (that "quantum" thingy again). The problem of the article is
that it is mixing the bulk carbon nanotube properties with the quantum
carbon nanotube properties - not at all the same thing. This is why
the conductance of a quantum nanotube wire in billions of Amperes
plunges to a rather more mundane 1/10th the resistance of copper for a
nanotube bundle.

The quantum properties quite rightly dismiss any notion of skin
effect, current travels inside the tube. In fact, it also distorts
the shape of the tube like a snake swallowing a golf ball. Even more
interesting is that current will flow in the opposite direction of the
applied EMF if there is a sufficient heat differential between the
ends (it doesn't take much heat because carbon nanotubes are
exceptionally good heat conductors). Firstly, getting current into a
carbon nanotube is not a pretty thing as they exhibit what is called
"non-reproducible behavior" by their nature of having a great variety
of conduction configurations that all arise out of their binding to a
contact material. For nano-conductors, contacts dominate everything.

All-in-all, the introduction of a new technology is frequently
confused as a better version of an old technology - something like
saying facsimile would replace the newspaper - or that the utilities
would pay us to use nuclear power. All the "forecasts" mentioned in
this article rank right up there with these world class pipe dreams.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

Richard Clark wrote:
. . .
All-in-all, the introduction of a new technology is frequently
confused as a better version of an old technology - something like
saying facsimile would replace the newspaper - or that the utilities
would pay us to use nuclear power. All the "forecasts" mentioned in
this article rank right up there with these world class pipe dreams.

On the other hand, sometimes the assumption that the new technology will
simply replace the old falls staggeringly short. The total market for
transistors was initially seen as being the same as for tubes -- replace
each tube with a transistor, and that's it. Hardly worth developing the
technology to overcome the gnarly manufacturing problems (e.g., extreme
purity requirement of the base material). No one foresaw the integrated
circuit, making it practical to put the equivalent of hundreds of
transistors in a pocket calculator, wris****ch, or even an electric
iron. The transistor made possible a whole new technology with
applications which were altogether impossible and therefore unimaginable
with tubes. But the best that the soothsayers can ever seemingly do is
to extrapolate from what we've got right now. Maybe the nanotubes won't
end up being simply a replacement for wires, but the basis for a whole
new technology we can't now conceive.

And maybe they won't. Every entrepreneur does his best to convince
investors that his invention will be the next integrated circuit or his
garage company the next Microsoft. But the odds are sure against it.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

On 27/04/2005 9:32 PM, Mike Coslo wrote:
I.Care wrote:

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67350,00.html



hmm. We'd better define better! And with that hard to define effect
"mobility", I wouldn't bet the house on it.

It looks like the major advantage is the light weight.

Of course that may be somewhat negated by the other promise of
carbon - the carbon ribbon that will allow us to build a space elevator!

Will this make a difference in Audio?


The audio geeks will be able to make up stuff for years about this......

Indeed. There's enough snake-oil being sold to audiophiles as it is.

Unless and until stereo mags and listeners actually do proper
double-blind tests, I think we can assume that this wire (if it ever
goes into general production) will be yet another way to liberate
hundreds of dollars a foot from gullible consumers.

"I.Care" bravely wrote to "All" (27 Apr 05 18:08:52)
--- on the heady topic of "All wire the Same? Maybe not in future."

I. From: I.Care
I. Xref: aeinews rec.radio.amateur.antenna:29266

I. NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
I. better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?


Will it transmit power better than silver wire?

A*s*i*m*o*v

.... I cut it three times already and it's still too short!

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 02:58:43 -0700, Roy Lewallen
wrote:

Every entrepreneur does his best to convince
investors that his invention will be the next integrated circuit or his
garage company the next Microsoft. But the odds are sure against it.

Been There [many times]
Failed at That [in direct proportion]

Does this mean that the resistance per ft for nanotubes is 1/10th that of
copper?


Rather than "nanotubes" I would assume that they are talking about some
kind of "room temperature" super conductor.



Ed

1/10 ohms of copper certainly is not a superconductor, however, it is a MUCH
superior conductor!

Regards,
John

I.Care wrote:

NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire. Will this make a difference in Audio?

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67350,00.html

I'm reminded of the hype over bubble memories some years ago. They were
going to be the ultimate memory, where are they now?

--

Peter

Wired Mag. is far from being all "hype", it is on the cutting edge of making
the public aware. a practice which the news media has abandoned.

Such as the following article:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/arc...9/diamond.html

However, since the great majority of people do not realize what this means,
they still purchase diamonds at ridiculous prices. I wish they would stop,
as hard as diamonds are, I'd like to pave my driveway with them!!!



Regards,

John

clvrmnky wrote:
On 27/04/2005 9:32 PM, Mike Coslo wrote:

I.Care wrote:


NASA is funding a new type of wire that can transmit power 10 times
better than normal wire.

http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67350,00.html



hmm. We'd better define better! And with that hard to define effect
"mobility", I wouldn't bet the house on it.

It looks like the major advantage is the light weight.

Of course that may be somewhat negated by the other promise of
carbon - the carbon ribbon that will allow us to build a space elevator!


Will this make a difference in Audio?


The audio geeks will be able to make up stuff for years about this......


Indeed. There's enough snake-oil being sold to audiophiles as it is.

Unless and until stereo mags and listeners actually do proper
double-blind tests, I think we can assume that this wire (if it ever
goes into general production) will be yet another way to liberate
hundreds of dollars a foot from gullible consumers.

What?!? Put all those manufacturers of accessories out of business?

What would we do without the cleaner for your CD's that makes them
sound better. A real product.

Or inch thick speaker cables between microscopic IC/Transistor/tube
wiring, and going to tiny speaker coils.

Interconnects cables made of both silver and copper wire to enhance
both low and high frequencies.

"Oxygen free" copper cables.

"directional" cables - hey, do these have a rectifier in them?


The list goes on and on...


The goofiest claims of some antenna manufacturers and affectionados are
quite tame by comparison.


- Mike KB3EIA -