It's the only result on Google Scholar for Vantablack, and vanta by itself brings down a storm of foreign language papers that appear unrelated.
And searching "Surrey Nanosystems" only brings up details of their process. It's hardly surprising that they won't publish the details though.
VANTA is an acronym, and is general to this type of research, so it's about as specific as googling carbon nanotubes. From Google Scholar, there's been two papers put out this year about VANTA CNTs on Al foils (as in the article) but neither list Surrey Nanosystems as a sponsor or research partner in the acknowledgements, so it is likely these are unrelated;
The partial space qualification of a vertically aligned carbon nanotube coating on aluminium substrates for EO applications, by Theocharous et al (same author as MSH's paper).
And
Freestanding foils of nanotube arrays fused with metals by Poenitzsch et al.
Ultimately, this is unsurprising; typically, industry based research isn't published, or at least, not until it's been patented to hell and back.
Now, as to the military applications, I actually don't think there'd be too many. Pure black is a horrible colour for camoflague, and I doubt it would have the same absorbance in radar wavelengths, so it's not so great for stealth planes. The linked article on VANTAs by MSH says it's spectrally flat in the IR range (0.8-14 um), so it might have some application in fooling thermal detection, but I doubt it.
Most likely, I'd say the biggest application would be as a heat-sink material; emissivity is equal to absorbance, so the blacker something is, the better a radiator it is. Coupled with the good heat conductance of the CNTs, this would be very helpful for dumping heat.
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Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 515025 times)