Quasi-Continuous Growth of Ultralong Carbon Nanotube Arrays

摘要

Owing to outstanding mechanical and electrical properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs),intense research efforts have been made to synthesize aligned long CNTs.Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) methods using transition metal nanoparticle catalysts have been widely used to produce long single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs).The growth of ultralong CVD SWNTs,whose lengths are up to approx4 cm,has been reported in the literature.On the other hand,the multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs) have great potential for nanomechanical and nanoelectrical applications,employing their excellent mechanical properties and hierarchal structures.However,the scale and diversity of the MWNT structures have been limited because of short lengths of available isolated MWNTs.In this paper,we present a simple and reliable method to synthesize several centimeters long MWNTs and SWNTs and discuss their structural and electrical characteristics.