Carbon nanotube-based fibres could rival copper in antennas

The discovery, which appears in Applied Physics Letters, is said to offer more potential applications for the strong, lightweight nanotube fibres developed by the Rice lab of chemist and chemical engineer Matteo Pasquali.

The lab introduced the first practical method for making high-conductivity carbon nanotube fibres in 2013 and has since tested them for use as brain implants and in heart surgeries.

The research could help engineers in streamlining materials for airplanes and spacecraft. Increased interest in wearables like wrist-worn health monitors and clothing with embedded electronics could benefit from strong, flexible and conductive fibre antennas that send and receive signals, Pasquali said.

The Rice team and colleagues at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a ‘specific radiation efficiency’ metric to judge how well nanotube fibres radiated signals at the common wireless communication frequencies of 1 and 2.4 gigahertz and compared their results with standard copper antennas.