[tahotdog]

Don't know about buckeyballs, but we should be making buildings and bridges out of carbonfiber and not out of steel.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

They're talking about using buckyballs to build a space elevator.

[auntyfemenist]

A little ot, but in my limited experience with carbon fiber items, mostly in the optical goods industry, this stuff doesn't seem to react well to temperature changes and peels apart in weird layers with wear. It is strong, but doesn't hold up in some forms. Maybe there are forms applications I am not familiar with?

[Red Badger]

Build buildings of Carbon fiber? It does burn...............

[LIConFem]

"...but we should be making buildings and bridges out of carbonfiber and not out of steel."

We probably will, at some point, but it's still too expensive.

[Willie Green]

but we should be making buildings and bridges out of carbonfiber and not out of steel.

Buildings and bridges are intricate structures, and engineering selection of appropriate construction materials is too complex to make such a generalized, mutually exclusive statement. I certainly think that the advanced properties of carbon fiber will have some application in building and bridge construction. However, there will be myriad situations where carbon fiber's properties will be undesirable compared to steel.

It is not a situation where steel is inherently "good" or carbon fiber is "bad" (or vice-versa). It's just that properties of materials can't be summarized by a meaningless adjective like "strength". The first thing an engineer is going to ask is "what kind of strength?" Tensile? Shear? Compression? Torsion? Impact resistance? etc. etc. etc.