Electrically conductive polymers (polyacetylene) misconception

Induction, deduction, extrapolation, and estimation are methods that will serve you well throughout your life. Hopefully in this course it'll be stress-free enough you can stop and think about things. My greatest inspiration comes when I'm shaving or when I'm taking a shower. I don't have anything else to do, and I think about something. I remember one time — this was about 30 years ago, a faculty member who's no longer here, a young faculty member in polymer science. Electrically conductive polymers were a big thing at the time. He was giving a presentation in the Chipman Room on his research. He pointed out that these new electrically conductive polymers — in this case polyacetylene, and the problem with polyacetylene is it tends to be unstable in air, so it decomposes, sort of like technetium has about a 10-hour life. He said all the rotating machinery would no longer be using copper, because these electrically conductive polymers have a higher specific conductivity than copper.

Brief reference back to a previous discussion. Used as an example of overselling — single-property optimization (specific electrical conductivity) without the design figure of merit.

So if you start thinking about the various properties — sort of like my example of the electrically conductive polymers, they said oh well, they've got a specific electrical conductivity. Yeah, but that's not the figure of merit for the design. People will talk about composites and fancy composites. Professor Gutowski in mechanical engineering — over twenty-five years ago now, when the LFM program first started — had a group of students go to Boeing working on advanced composites. The 777 was supposed to be 80% composites. They canned that after a couple of years and made it mostly aluminum, just like the previous aircraft. The 787 finally, twenty years later, did make it to a fair amount of composites, but there's lots of problems. Professor Gutowski works in environmental things now, but he was working in advanced composites, and he came back and said, I've been working on the wrong thing. He says I've been trying to make better composites. What we need are cheaper composites. Which is sort of Jim Williams's corollary — people have fantastic composites with tremendous strength, but you can't afford them.