Continuous Growth of Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotubes

Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs), sometimes called forests or carpets, are a promising material due to their unique physical and scale-dependent physical properties [1-3]. Continuous production of VACNTs is required for large-scale applications in electronic devices, fuel cells and structural composite materials [4] among others. Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is the only available technique to produce large areas of VACNTs, and most of the studies done for this technique are done for stationary growth in batch CVD processing [5-7]. Recently, it has been demonstrated that there is no significant differences between the VACNTs grown at different velocities up to 1.1 mm/s in terms of quality, morphology and length using a CVD process in a custom cold wall continuous-feed reactor [8]. Here, a controlled process to synthesize aligned CNTs in a continuous manner is discussed. Uniform growth is achieved using different substrates including alumina fibers in bundle form and silicon wafers.Airbus IndustrieBoeing CompanyEmpresa Brasileira de AeronáuticaLockheed MartinSaab (Firm)Spirit AeroSystems (Firm)Textron, Inc.Composite Systems Technology (Firm)Hexcel (Firm)NECST Consortiu