Portable X-ray equipment company Micro-X has received increased orders for its lightweight Nano portable X-ray machine for use in diagnosing advanced cases of the Covid-19 coronavirus, and as a result is scaling up of its manufacturing capabilities.
The Australia-based company has developed the world’s first and only carbon fibre nanotube X-ray emitter. The company had started limited sales when the virus hit, but has now received new orders worth $600,000 for the machines, bringing total sales for the quarter so far to $2.4 million. Micro-X managing director Peter Rowland said: “We are responding rapidly but very carefully to the unprecedented shift in the scale and market dynamics for mobile X-ray units by increasing our production capacity and responsiveness for the Nano. We see bringing forward our planned investment from next year as a key strategic decision to position the company to best respond to the explosion in market demand we have seen from this global pandemic.”
Carbonics has reported that its carbon nanotube technology achieved speeds exceeding 100 GHz in RF applications. This industry milestone surpasses the performance, including efficiency, of current RF CMOS technology, which is ubiquitous in consumer electronics such as cell phones. The result shows the potential of this new technology to provide a powerful boost for 5G and mmWave applications.
Scaling the performance of single carbon nanotube devices suggests the technology could exceed GaAs, the top-tier incumbent RF technology. Carbonics employs a deposition technology called ZEBRA, which enables carbon nanotubes to be densely aligned and deposited onto a variety of chip substrates such as silicon, silicon-on-insulator, quartz and flexible materials. This allows direct integration with traditional CMOS digital logic, overcoming the typical problem of heterogeneous integration.
Further information at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-019-0326-y and http://carbonicsinc.com/
Canadian-based Capital Power has announced plans to build the world’s first commercial-scale carbon nanotube production facility at its Genesee power station.
The company is an investor in Calgary-based C2CNT, which has developed a technology that captures and transforms carbon dioxide into carbon nanotubes, which can be used as an additive to substantially increase the strength of materials such as concrete, steel and aluminum.
“Capital Power plans to start commercial scale production of CNTs at its Genesee facility, assuming the CNTs in concrete testing and preliminary marketing of the product is successful,” the company said. “This would include expected approvals of required permits and construction to commence in the summer of 2020 and expected operations in the first half of 2021.” The Genesee Carbon Conversion Centre could generate 2,500 tonnes of carbon nanotubes per year.
In May 2019, Capital Power committed to increase its equity interest in C2CNT from 5 percent to 9 percent by March of 2020. The company said it now intends to increase its interest to 40 percent by the end of 2020, assuming the C2CNT and concrete project is successful. https://www.c2cnt.com/
