Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are scaling up the production of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT). This incredible material could revolutionize diverse commercial products ranging from rechargeable batteries, sporting goods, and automotive parts to boat hulls and water filters. The research was published recently in the journal Carbon.
Most carbon nanotube (CNT) production today is unorganized CNT architectures that is used in bulk composite materials and thin films. However, for many uses, organized CNT architectures, like vertically aligned forests, provide critical advantages for exploiting the properties of individual CNTs in macroscopic systems.
“Robust synthesis of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes at large scale is required to accelerate deployment of numerous cutting-edge devices to emerging commercial applications,” said LLNL scientist and lead author Francesco Fornasiero. “To address this need, we demonstrated that the structural characteristics of single-walled CNTs produced at wafer scale in a growth regime dominated by bulk diffusion of the gaseous carbon precursor are remarkably invariant over a broad range of process conditions.”
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