Scientists grow carbon nanotube forest much longer than any other

Date	4th, Nov 2020

Summary:

Carbon nanotube (CNT) forests are a solution to scaling up the production of CNTs, which are becoming a staple in many industries. However, even the best catalyst used to grow these forests deteriorates quickly, capping possible forest length at ~2 cm. Now, scientists from Japan have proposed a way to ensure longer catalyst lifetime and higher growth rate, creating a CNT forest that is a record seven times longer than any existing CNT array.

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video: Although carbon nanotube forests are hard to grow very long via conventional methods, a little tweak in technique can change things dramatically. view more

Credit: Hisashi Sugime, Waseda University

Today, a multitude of industries, including optics, electronics, water purification, and drug delivery, innovate at an unprecedented scale with nanometer-wide rolls of honeycomb-shaped graphite sheets called carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Features such as light weight, convenient structure, immense mechanical strength, superior thermal and electrical conductivities, and stability put CNTs a notch above other material alternatives. However, to supply their rising industrial demand, their production must be constantly scaled up, and therein lies the main challenge to using CNTs.

While scientists have been able to grow individual CNTs approximately 50 cm in length, when they attempt arrays, or forests, they hit a ceiling at around 2 cm. This is because the catalyst, which is key to CNT growth occurring, deactivates and/or runs out before CNTs in a forest can grow any longer, driving up monetary and raw-material costs of CNT production and threatening to cap its industrial use.

Now, a ceiling-breaking strategy has been devised by a team of scientists from Japan. In their

Source:

EurekAlert