What you eat—carbohydrates, proteins & fats—they’re all made of carbon. You metabolize and exhale some of that carbon as CO2. Plants grab those molecules, set the oxygen free and turn the carbon into, well, plants for you to eat. Some plans become trees where the carbon makes wood strong enough to build your home; carbon makes blades sharp enough to cut those trees; burning carbon heats the furnace to make that steel. I can go on like this indefinitely.
Now and then we learn to make new things out of carbon. High carbon steel is why suspension bridges and skyscrapers exist. Carbon fiber is why Lamborghini, jumbo jets and the New Glenn Rocket exist. Modern material science brought us graphene—a layer of carbon just one atom thick—which can make transistors 1,000 times faster than silicon.
Most promising of all, individual carbon nanotubes have shown a tensile strength over 100 times greater than steel at one-sixth the weight. Their electrical conductivity is 5X copper, while thermal conductivity exceeds diamond (another carbon structure that can have a big impact on your life).
You’ve heard about all this stuff for years and have probably wondered what ever happened to our amazing future full of nanotubes? Well, they did go a lot of places, expensive places. Nanotube dust is in the battery of your iPhone but that’s about it. The first problem with carbon nanotubes was figuring out how to make a lot of them. Even when that got solved, nobody could consistently make them long enough to be truly useful.
New Carbon is about to change all of that. 10-years & $150MM of public & private R&D funding created the fastest, cheapest, most scalable process for producing carbon nanotubes that are orders of magnitude longer than any other process.
New Carbon will start by producing structural and conductive sheets and tapes, structural yarns, and conductive wires made of ultra long carbon nanotubes. General purpose products that can go into hundreds of applications. Structural panels for aircraft and spaceships; metalless data cables; energy dissipation skins for EMI and heat; heating elements built into walls, windows, floors & ceilings.
Over time, as production capacity grows, CO2-free alternatives to steel, concrete, and aluminum are coming. Structural beams, tubes, & rods. Honeycomb core structures for floors, walls & wings. Also Serena Williams racquet, Shaun White’s snowboard & Lewis Hamilton’s car.
If you know people working in composites or who need the highest performance materials ever made, now is your chance to give them a superpower. Just reach out to New Carbon.