ABSTRACT
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), a distinct molecular form of carbon atoms that was discovered in the late 1980s (Kelly and Kim, 2007), were exhaustively discovered by Sumio Iijima in 1991 (Iijima, 1991). Later on in the year 2000, President Bill Clinton established the National Nanotechnology Initiative to lead the United States into the next industrial revolution (White House, 2000). Nanomaterials are the building blocks of this new industry. One of the major objectives of the initiative was to develop materials that are 10 times stronger than steel but a fraction of the weight for making all kinds of land, sea, air, and space vehicles lighter and more fuel efcient. This statement specically implicates CNTs, a novel and lightweight material with the strongest tensile strength of all synthetic bers (Ball, 1999). The presidential initiative directed NASA to search for applications of carbon nanotubes and other nanomaterial in aerospace.
