Carbon Nanotubes Video Lecture - Civil Engineering (CE)

hello everyone and welcome to our third
episode in our 30-day tesseract dice
Kickstarter campaign video series
yesterday we talked about precious gems
and today we're going to be talking
about precious metals and again precious
metals aren't always precious because
they're useful sometimes they're just
pretty or rare but because of supply and
demand they become more and more
expensive however a lot of precious
metals are so quite valuable
silver has a lot of antibacterial
properties bacteria actually doesn't
like to live on the surface of silver so
a lot of doctors tools utilize silver
because if they use them on you you
can't really get sick between patient to
patient Gold is very very useful because
it's highly conductive just like copper
and both of these are going to be used a
whole lot inside computer or electronic
components they work in circuits they
work in batteries they work in
processors they work in your screen
whole lot of reasons why you want gold
and copper of then just let's say
jewelry platinum is much much much much
rare and might be a little bit prettier
might be used in different tools and
things like that but it is far less
practical uses as even say aluminum
however aluminum is far less valuable
because it's so stinking common and so
easy to produce aluminum is one of the
lightest of our metals and when used in
alloys or combinations of different
metals it can actually be rather strong
however one of my personal favorite
metals is titanium which is stronger
than steel which is in itself an alloy
to make it stronger and is as light as
aluminum it's this miracle substance and
it too is actually a little bit rare
it's rather disappointing that one of
our best materials is too rare to use in
as many things as we like to use it in
so titanium would be this great metal
but has this shortcoming luckily enough
though like in yesterday's episode when
we talked about Q carbon compared to
diamonds there is a synthetic substance
that we have created that is stronger
and lighter than almost any metal we
know of and this is called carbon
nanotubes now just like yesterday Q
carbon was something that was subject to
a men
heating pressure which made it stronger
and harder than diamonds and the great
thing about carbon is it's a really
really common substance it's only the
sixth element on our periodic table of
elements which means it's really really
stinking common and carbon nanotubes are
no different they are synthetically made
carbon structures but they're made out
of carbon now there can be a little bit
difficult to manufacture because carbon
nanotubes get their immense strength
from the fact that they're millions of
millions of little tiny carbon cylinder
stacked on top of each other so when you
press them down they have a lot of
combined strength it'd be sort of like
stacking a bunch of plastic straws
together in a big structure and trying
to press down they actually get really
really strong you have all these spheres
pressing up against each other
imagine that shrunk down to a
microscopic level and instead of using
plastic which in itself is pretty
flexible use carbon which is basically
the same thing you have in charcoal
briquets which can be as hard as a rock
already the carbon nanotubes aren't just
great because they are light and strong
in fact lighter and stronger than
titanium they also have several sort of
miracle uses including purifying salt
water scientists have recently
discovered that by pouring salt water
through carbon nanotube structures they
can actually filter out the salt
particles
this is incredibly great news if we were
able to mass-produce this effect you
have states like California which have
lots and lots of salt water in very very
little freshwater which is actually used
for drinking the important thing that we
use water for and the salt water isn't
so great for that now there are salt
water facilities which evaporate salt
water in order to pull freshwater from
the salt water and leave the salt behind
but that's very costly and as the water
absorbs the heat from the heat structure
it actually cools it back down and then
energy has to be used to heat it back up
before it can purify more water it's
very very impractical yet with carbon
nanotubes it's basically just pouring it
through a very very advanced version of
a life straw basically as you pour the
water in the salt is going to be taken
out live straw is really only take out
imperfections but carbon nanotubes could
be the future of hydrating the world
not to mention making our airplanes or
tanks our cars our computers and our
cell phones stronger faster lighter all
these great things just because some
scientists put a very very common
substance in a very very unique
structure thank you so much for watching
today's episode on precious metals and
carbon nanotubes and make sure to join
us tomorrow when we talk about Thomas
Edison not just his Edison bulb his true
greatest invention the electrical
infrastructure that went around it and
why it may not be as great as you think
it was but probably better than you
already thought and if you'd like to
support our Kickstarter campaign or just
check out more pictures and videos of
the dice you can check the link below in
the description below and we will see
you tomorrow when we get talking about
the electrical infrastructure that
Thomas Edison made see you guys that