How can buckyballs be used

First, they might exhibit a property so remarkable that they could be used to create products unlike any now on the market. Once this revolutionary product were demonstrated, the costs associated with manufacturing fullerenes would be reduced by ramping up to large-scale production.

The hard part has been thinking up such a unique application for fullerenes. In this case, the new product would have to be better, cheaper, less harmful to the environment or in some other way superior to what is now available.

Although researchers have had no shortage of ideas for uses of fullerenes, none of these have yet been shown to be commercially competitive. After all, we already have effective lubricants, steadily improving superconductors and so on. There may be a breakthrough just around the corner, but the applications sector is likely to establish property rights before disclosing the breakthrough. A quick search of the Internet using the keywords 'fullerene patents' returns many hits, and going to the Fullerene Patent Database leads to a list of related patents awarded through For example, one direct outcome of fullerene research has been the discovery of carbon-based nanotubes.

A technology based on nanotubes might never have come had it not been for the discovery of fullerenes. Such is the connectedness of science. Not to my knowledge. Nanotechnology Now.

Medical Nannotech. Exploring opportunities with nanotechnology. Toggle navigation MENU. What is Nanotechnology? As time went on and scientists got to grips with buckyballs and their potential, things got even weirder. In , the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope caught a glimpse of the buckyballs for the first time in space , tucked away in the clouds of a planetary nebula, or the remains of a star after it has sheds its outer layer.

Two years later, scientists discovered particles of buckyballs in the gas orbiting around a star — essentially stacked up buckyballs in a single mass — adding weight to the initial NASA observations. And in , the Hubble Space Telescope provided the most concrete evidence of buckyballs in space yet. It detected the spherical molecules floating around in interstellar medium. These observations defied a prevailing theory of the limits of the universe: that only light molecules, composed of one to ten atoms, could ever be present.

Instead, these buckyballs contained up to Carbon atoms. But then again, nothing about buckyballs is conventional. Interstellar space is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium, and carbon atoms are known to bond with different kinds of atoms. When our sun becomes a red star in a few billion years, it will gobble up Mercury and Venus. They had expected a similarly random, and uninteresting, assortment of carbon clusters like that found by the Exxon people.

Most of those contained from 2 to 30 carbon atoms, with some much larger clusters of even-numbered atoms. There were also increased amounts at carbon intervals: , , carbon clusters. But there was something strange about the carbon cluster that drew their attention. Much more of it appeared in their samples than could be explained by random formation—three times more than any other even-numbered cluster.

As the Rice chemists kicked these results around, they asked two questions: Why even-numbered clusters and why so much carbon? But, Smalley recalls, such a flat molecule would have unattached dangling chemical bonds at its ends with no apparent way to tie them up. Besides, why should such an open-ended cluster have exactly 60 carbon atoms, no more and no less? Maybe those flat sheets they talked about actually curled around to form a sphere and would turn out looking something like a geodesic dome.

That would take care of the dangling-bond problem. Heath spent that evening with his wife trying to assemble a C molecule out of gum drops and toothpicks, a sticky and eventually unedifying enterprise. Meanwhile, Smalley sat down at his computer and tried to generate a model structure for a atom ball of carbon. After hours of work, he got nowhere. Frustrated, he began cutting regular hexagons out of legal paper, one inch on a side, and tried to make a sphere out of them. No dice. As he reached for an after-midnight beer, he remembered Kroto saying that he had once built a geodesic dome for his children, and that it might have contained regular pentagons as well as hexagons.

So Smalley cut out a pentagon and began arranging hexagons around it, adding more pentagons and hexagons, taping the flimsy paper shapes together as he worked, and finally, halfway through, saw he had something. In fact, the paper model formed a ball; it even bounced when dropped on the floor. It had 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. Each of the 60 vertices, or corners, representing one carbon atom, was identical to the others; each occurred at the joining point of one pentagon and two hexagons.

The shape seemed so elegant that Smalley knew it had to be well known to geometricians. The structure is technically called a truncated icosahedron, one of an infinite number of spheroidal cages that can be formed with hexagons and pentagons. Buckminster Fuller realized that many of these structures are endowed with unusual rigidity for their mass because of their geometry. Thus, the strong, light-weight geodesic dome was born. Today, it is also known as buckyball.

Many scientists were intrigued by the idea; some were disturbed by it. Disagreement came from the Exxon group, who stuck to the idea that the carbon clusters were most likely composed of uninteresting, cross-linked strands of atoms. After announcing their exciting discovery, the Rice people were in a bind. They had only fractions of a milligram of C, not enough to confirm its existence. Obviously, they had to produce a whole lot of buckminsterfullerene, enough of the stuff so it could be thoroughly analyzed.

Smalley assigned the job to Heath. The Rice researchers collected the black stuff that was coming out of the nozzle of the cluster beam apparatus. For two years, Heath mixed the material with benzene, hoping the solvent would concentrate appreciable amounts of C The effort was a bust. Instead, the answer came from Tucson and Heidelberg, Germany, in a way that demonstrates the sometimes inexplicable nature of scientific breakthroughs.