Patent ID: 11875921
Assignee: NORTHROP GRUMMAN SYSTEMS CORPORATION
Field: Electrical machinery, apparatus, energy (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H  C | IPC C  H

Claim 0:
1. A method for making a carbon nanotube (CNT) cable, comprising:
chemically pretreating CNT yarn using chlorosulfonic acid;
lowering a copper deposition rate so as to be less than or equal to 12 microns per minute, electroplating so as to surround each of a pair of 24 American Wire Gauge (24AWG) wires with plating, each wire comprising two or more sub-cores, at least one sub-core comprising the CNT yarn, wherein the CNT yarn comprises chemically stretched CNT yarn, wherein the CNT yarn comprises one or more of a quad-axial yarn and a triax yarn, thereby creating plated wires, wherein the plating comprises copper, wherein the plating has a thickness less than or equal to 15 microns;
twisting the copper-plated wires together, wherein the twisting step comprises twisting together the two or more sub-cores, thereby creating a pair of-twisted wires, each comprising the two or more sub-cores, wherein the twisting step further comprises controlling a number of sub-cores; and
surrounding the plated twisted wires with an electrical layer configured to shield the plated twisted wires, thereby creating the CNT cable, the CNT cable having a radio frequency (RF) insertion loss less than or equal to 4.0 decibels per foot at a frequency of 4 Gigahertz, the CNT cable having a grain size less than 10 microns, the CNT cable having a data transfer rate of at least 1.25 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s), the CNT cable having a data transfer rate more than 40 times a maximum data rate of prior art cables lacking electroplated copper, the CNT cable having a data transfer rate more than three times a data transfer speed of Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0, the CNT cable having a weight of approximately 0.12 grams per foot, and the CNT cable having conductivity between 10 megasiemens per meter to 58.5 megasiemens per meter.