Next Generation Electrical Wires for Navy Applications
Abstract
This proposal will fundamentally understand the effects of combining carbon nanotubes(CNT) with various metals toward the development of CNT-based cables that significantlyreduce weight and increase performance efficiencies for applications in U.S. Navy ships andother DoD platforms. This understanding will allow for faster development and manufacturingof such cables toward the fundamental goal of replacing existing copper based cables with onesthat are based on CNTs or other related nanostructures. The current lack of such fundamentalunderstanding of the metal-CNT interactions has led to a steep learning curve for cabledevelopment and this project will address such shortcoming and ultimately increase the speed forCNT based cable development. In particular, this project will investigate CNT-coppernanocomposites. Compared with the current copper wirings, the proposed CNT-copper wires canpotentially be 2.5 times more electrically and thermally conductive, allow up to 3 orders ofmagnitude higher currents, and be much lighter and stronger. The two major problems this fieldis facing are: i) fabricating a wire where individual nanotubes are surrounded by copper and arealigned in the wire direction is challenging and ii) CNT-copper nanocomposites achieved underconventional processes exhibit a poor charge transport. We set out to fundamentally understandenabling approaches to overcome these issues by i) investigating novel fabrication methodswhere aligned CNTs and metals can be mixed at the nanoscale and ii) utilizing advancedprocesses to engineer and tune CNT-copper interfaces, which wouldn???t be otherwise possible.The ultraconductive CNT-copper material is expected to result in breakthroughs in advancednaval power systems where it can enable at least two times reduction in weight/size of numerousnavy platform components including motors, transformers, generators and electrical wiring. Theoutcome of this project, therefore, directly addresses the great challenge of meeting current andfuture Navy and United States Marine Corps power and energy needs by improving agility,efficiency and power density of future ships, submarines and air vehicles. This YIP project willfoster collaboration between a team of top scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory andother Department of Defense and Energy Laboratories, respectively, with the PI???s team at theUniversity of New Mexico, to tackle a challenging scientific problem.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 10, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812441
Entities
People
- Mehran Tehrani
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of New Mexico