China makes super durable materials for

A research team from China's Tsinghua University has announced the successful development of a super-durable carbon fiber that can be used to make so-called "space elevators".

According to Hong Kong's SCMP newspaper, the Chinese team described the following: 1cm of ³ new materials (made of carbon nanotubes ), weighs only 1.6 grams but will not break under the weight of 160 elephants, more than 800 tons.

"This is a shocking invention," said Wang Changqing, a Chinese research scientist on the elevator and not part of Tsinghua University, who praised their invention.

In the future, space elevators may become true - (Photo: SCMP).

The work of the Chinese team of scientists has been published in the journal Nature NanoTechnology. They found that the strength of the new nanofiber carbon fiber was 9-45 times higher than other materials.

In terms of applications, the newly evaluated material will be very useful in high-end areas such as sports equipment, bulletproof armor, aviation, space and even space elevator manufacturing.

The idea of ​​a space elevator sounds "fictitious" but actually people dreamed about it for a long time. Scientists have also produced many different designs of the type of tool that can bring people to space quickly in the past few decades.

In theory, it will slide on two strands, stretching with gravity and centrifugal force, while rotating with the Earth. This has so far been physically and mathematically impossible because there are no materials that are light and durable enough to make cables.

The US Aerospace Agency (NASA) once won a $ 2 million prize in 2005 for inventing such materials. As a result, no one has touched the prize.

And now, Tsinghua University team led by Professor Wei Fei is confident that they have invented the kind of material that NASA needs, even 10 times more durable than required (80 compared to 7 gigapascals).

Of course, there are still many technical obstacles to turn the idea of ​​space elevator into reality. But countries like China, the US, Russia and Japan are still pouring money into this research.

Meanwhile, scientists expect to soon adopt new materials in manufacturing electric cars, defense equipment (such as laser fireworks) and many other areas.