I am about to glass my 1st bd with liquid nano carbon impregnated resin,is there anybody out there …with any experiencein this new material
Maurice
if you’re not part of this research project you might want to contact them about do this kind of thing.
I think they are in the process of patenting the whole concept/process.
Quote:
: Oceanit’s Nano Surfboard Makes Waves Again. Small Times Magazine Small Times Magazine catches wind of Oceanit’s Nano board. Small Times Magazine covers everything nano from technology to materials. Click here for PDF of article.
Catching the nanotech wave
A team of engineers from Oceanit Laboratories in Hawaii are making big waves in the nanotech community with a nanotech-empowered surfboard. It’s a full-sized eight-foot-long board - or ‘gun’ as the real surfers call it - designed to ride the giant, storm-generated swells that pound Hawaii’s north shore every winter.
“Lots of boards break on the north shore very easily,” says Ian Kitajima, Oceanit’s marketing manager. In fact it was his boss’ broken surfboard that prompted the idea for their new invention. The two were surfing together one morning, brainstorming ways to make nanotechnology products that the public could understand and embrace. The surfboard broke, and an idea was born.
The Oceanit nanotech board is traditionally-made, with a foam core and fiberglass cloth, but it is coated with resin teeming with titanium nanoparticles that the company says make the board three times less likely to fracture and 100 percent more ding-proof - without impacting flexibility or weight.
“That’s always been the problem with making surfboards out of new material, like Kevlar,” notes Vinod Veedu, the engineer at Oceanit who designed the resin. “It changes the performance of the board and makes it inflexible or fragile in other ways.”
Veedu notes that many groups have been trying to produce a titanium resin for surfboards for years without success, mostly because of dispersion issues. “The key is in the proportions of titanium, and we just got it right,” he says of the closely guarded resin formula. Except for a slightly heavier viscosity which requires more work to get the resin into the fiberglass, the resin doesn’t change the design or use of the surfboard.
The new board is 10 percent more flexible than regular surfboards, according to Mehrdad Ghasemi Nejhad, director of the Hawaiian Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Hawaii and co-developer of the resin. “Surfers love flexibility, so our board has it all,” he said.
The nanotech board promises to ride like the wind and last twice as long as traditional boards - although that’s still just a prediction. While Ghasemi Nejhad and Veedu, the company’s senior nanotechnology engineer, have verified its greater durability and flexibility in lab tests, the board wasn’t finished in time for the giant winter waves that hit the north shore. The board has been in dry dock at Oceanit’s offices waiting to prove itself - with a list of volunteers clamoring to take it on a maiden voyage. “We put our magic into this board,” said Ghasemi Nejhad, “now we are just waiting for the next big wave.”
Isn’t Waimea breaking today? That should be plenty big enough for a field test.
Speak up Maurice, we still can’t hear you…
Maurice, I haven’t used CNT-Epoxy yet but have been following the research with interest for the past couple of years. I will be testing some CNT-Epoxy from a certain French company soon. I would just expect the epoxy would be thicker, flow less, and it would be darker(black). It should glass just like normal epoxy other wise. I assume you are either buying an epoxy additive or an already mixed epoxy? If you have more involved questions the engineers form the company should be helpful, they may not be surfboard glassers but most of them know their products and can give good advice.
I know I haven’t been too much help, but good luck and let us know how it goes.
For god sakes man, turning your hearing aid on.
That does sound interesting…
Nano Tech could be the next big thing…I would love to see little nano-bots running around glassing from within the resin.
But seriously Maurice, yeah, do tell how it goes…
Josh
Interesting subject. We’ve played with this some recently. Requires a change in the resin system to really be effective. Modulus, viscosity, mix ratio and surface spread all need to be tweaked to get this correct. Don’t know what the guys in HI are doing, don’t know if they have the formulating skills or if their just adding stuff to existing systems. The stuff has real potential if done right but it should be redesigned from the ground up using cyclos to reach the real cutting edge. I’d be happy to pow wow if anyone serious is interested via PM.
I would be concerned with inhaling any nano metallic particles. I do not know if currnet breathing filter technology keeps up with nano tech. (see link below)
Just keep in mind nano means very small, on the order of 1,000,000,000 / (1) billionth / 10-9th power.
Anyone experimenting with such particles may want to read up…
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nas/ppt/QUADCharts07/Z1NT_FY07_QC.htm
Not sure about this stuff. Its still FRP; still need the FG. FG has roughly 40-50X the strength of the best resins. Any cured resin should have measurable physical properties…so why describe it as ‘majic’? Arent we passed that sort of speak? Any company marketing such a product should publish numbers but maybe its too soon… If it works better, I’d be willing to try it.
Craftee is right. In a two-phase material like resin/glass, there is a “strong” component, ie the glass and a matrix component ie the resin. The role of the resin is to transfer shear stress to tensile stress in the fiber and visa versa. There is only so much strength needed in the resin to do the job. It is the glass that carries the load.
absolutely correct! the particles are so small and toxic to the lungs,that is why we received the CNT in paste form as an additive to the resin-the people responsible for CNT paste say in the future you would buy pre-impregnated CNT epoxy resin
Maurice, are you using CNT additive from Zyvex? I was going to order from them about a year ago, but they said some things over the phone to me which had me thinking they were full of BS. One of the first questions they asked me was if I was just using this for marketing, which got me thinking maybe a lot of the claims about CNTs are just propaganda. Their sales department and their engineers would tell me two different things. The salesman I talked to told me it would be safe, I wouldn’t need any kind of special equipment or safety precautions. The engineers told me I should at least have a good mixer and that the results are not noticable. They said Easton took a couple of years and a couple of million dollars to figure out how to use the CNTs right. Taking all of this in account I opt-ed of purchasing any for “testing”.
However, I do still think there is potential there. The technology has grown in the past year and I think the bigger companies have their acts together. I saw a company that has a pre-mixed epoxy infusion version, which what I’ll probably be testing soon.
As long as your not just mixing CNTs into Epoxy, theres not much danger. The individual CNTs are trapped in the resin, so the smallest particles you have are the same particles you have when your normally sanding. If it wasn’t already in the additive I would tell you it’s too dangerous, being that they are so small they could literally pass through your skin cells ( less then 1/10k the diameter of a human hair).
Does the MSDS contain a warning about sanding cured titanium nano tube resin? That action will break the titanium nano particles free. That’s what worries me. I work with carbon fiber and epoxy, but I mold and don’t sand the finished product (fins). Still, scissor cutting the CF is nasty business. A world famous shaper warned me about CF rigth after I bought my roll and I didn’t do anything with it for over year maybe two, till I had my procedures figured out. But I can still improve.
I wonder if titanium nano particles are worth the risk?
A few years ago I remember some painters talking about titanium oxide in paint being the next “asbestos”.
I have not read the EPA report I posted. I woke up too early this morning. It was a terrible mistake but I had a lot of homework to get done and I just didn’t have time to read what I was putting up here. But I was alarmed at the thought of titanium nano particles freed by sanding.
I’ll bottom line it.
We need shapers like you.
I for one won’t put my wants over your health.
Too many shapers have checked out way too soon.
This is one tech that has red flags all over it.
Stay healthy and make a slightly weaker board. Who cares? That suits me just fine.
well eventually things will get a little closer.
jump in a hazmat suit like the old epoxy maui sailboard days and put togethor a concoction of some of this nano saturated epoxy with some of this new fabric once they figure out how to manufacture it on a large scale and you may get closer to the elusive indestructo surfboard holy grail we all seem to chasing…
Personally I don’t seem it coming to fruition as there’s no market for indestructible anything in sports equipment when the design style/marketing hype changes with each new years model and each new annoucement of the “new sdesign of the year”.
new upcoming fabric(10 years?)
Quote:
snip from gizmodo… Zetix is a fabric so strong it will resist multiple car bomb blasts without breaking. It absorbs and disperses the energy from explosions thanks to an inner structure so adamantiumtastic it can be used in body armor, window covering, military tents and hurricane defenses—it might even be able to fend off my ex-wife. When not shielding from explosions, it can be used as medical sutures that won’t damage body tissue. All of this is thanks to a property that apparently defies the laws of physics. Zetix is built around the principle of auxetics: objects that actually get fatter the more you stretch them. Though it hurts to think about, as you will discover, it actually makes sense. To demonstrate how Zetix works, the best thing is to look how a thread behaves. When you jump from a bridge using a bungee cord, the force of gravity acting over your body weight will stretch it as you go down in free fall. While this happens, the cord threads will stretch getting closer together and making the cord get thinner as it expands through a larger distance. However, if you coil a line around the bungee cord, something that defies logic will happen: the whole structure will get wider as it stretches. As you can see in the image, the line around the bungee cord becomes taut, making the bungee itself flex outward. This principle is called helical-auxetics. When you put two of these threads together, you have what Reed Richards would call an auxetic structure.When you take this to the micro level, you can create a fabric formed from thousands of these helically wound threads. The resulting global structure is so strong that it can dissipate the energies of multiple blasts without breaking, unlike other materials of this class. In fact, the expanding properties of Zetix give it almost miraculous properties. According to Dr. Patrick Hook—the creator of the fabric and managing director of Auxetix Ltd.—this fabric is “a design that can save lives” and, more importantly, it can do so repeatedly. “Most blast defenses are only capable of coping with a single explosion event and, once deployed and used, all significant protection is lost,” he told Gizmodo. This material has other uses beyond terrorist attacks or battle scenarios, said Dr. Hook. The fabrics can “provide sustained protection and gives emergency services extra time to rescue trapped or injured people,” and can offer effective protection against natural forces like hurricanes, as well as be deployed in containment systems, military tents, ballistic mosquito nets and body armor, a $2 billion pret-a-porter market. Another advantage of Zetix is its low cost: other blast-protective textiles are made entirely of very expensive high-performance materials; Zetix uses them too, but in much smaller proportions. Zetix combines the good stuff with “cheaper bulk components” in a 1-to-100 ratio while maintaining it’s blast-resistant properties. The cost difference only gets crazier when you remember that this can be used multiple times. Though the company is in talks with multiple manufacturers to go into mass production, we don’t yet know when you’ll be able to buy this stuff at Home Depot to protect against the next hurricane or tornado, let alone when Chen will be able to buy underwear made completely from it for his next pantsing session. [Auxetix]
Reinforcements
Reinforcement fibres can be used in composite structures to reduce weight or increase safety. The primary failure mechanism of composite materials is through reinforcement “pull-out“. This is a tensile failure caused by the reinforcing fibres getting narrower and breaking free of the resin that is meant to hold them together (de-bonding). They then slip through the remaining matrix until they break free – the energy required to do this defines the amount of energy that the structure can absorb under a failure condition. Due to the fact that auxetic materials expand, however, if a small proportion (<5%) of the conventional fibres were replaced with fine auxetic yarns, the energy required to cause de-bonding and slippage would be much greater. This would increase the load required to cause structural failure, and also increase the structure’s ability to absorb loads imposed by extreme events, such as impacts or explosions. In other words, a composite structure could be lighter for the same strength, or stronger for the same weight
there are a number of companies involved in manufacture CNT’s! at present there is not enough being manufactured worldwide to satisfy demand! Bayer are building a 2nd factory to make 30 metric tons pa,and have medium term plan for a 3000 ton facility! all the big global players such as Dupont-a lot of these companies have smaller divisions under another name.
I hear you about the size & potential that the CNT fibres are even smaller than Asbestos particles,and would be very dangerous if not in resin-with my bd we are using epoxy fillacoats without the CNT’s and are using appropriate masks and suits–as CNT’s are much stronger than carbon fibres we are potetially entering a whole new world as the people who are supplying me have said the future for s/bds should be not using glass but dipping/coating shaped blank ,curing then surfing-now thats what I call a future!!I will keep posted results as I surf the new bd next monday!