Spinning yarn from long carbon nanotube arrays
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Mark J. Schulz Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0072
Vesselin Shanova) Department of Chemical and Material Science Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0012 (Received 2 May 2010; accepted 11 November 2010)
Spinning carbon nanotube (CNT) thread directly from 4–6 mm long aligned carbon nanotube arrays is reported here. The strength of carbon nanotube thread was improved by optimizing the chemical vapor deposition parameters for growing long aligned carbon nanotube arrays. The morphological and structural characterization of CNT arrays and threads were studied by Raman spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. After optimization of growth parameters threads were spun with diameters between 10 and 70 lm. We have achieved thread strength of about 280 MPa. I. INTRODUCTION
Currently, research on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is of immense interest and growing very rapidly because of their outstanding mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties.1–5 CNTs are chemically inert with extremely high strength (50 GPa) and high modulus (1 TPa).6 CNTs are a very promising candidate for both textile and engineering applications, either in pure form or in composite with selected polymers.7 Furthermore, CNTs have become a very attractive material for many industries such as aerospace, body armor, and sporting goods industries. Exciting research efforts have been undertaken to synthesize long aligned CNTs.8–10 Currently, only a few groups have reported synthesis of high-quality long CNT arrays.3,8–11 Hata et al. have succeeded in growing 2.5 mm long aligned single-wall CNTs with a water-assisted catalytic vapor deposition (CVD) technique.11 Recently, Chakrabarti synthesized long (7 mm) CNT array over a 12 h period by CVD.12 Twisting of long CNT arrays to make continuous yarns has become an important area of research for many industrial applications such as high-strength structural material and highly conducting fibers especially for high-frequency applications. The advantages of spinning threads from long CNT arrays are that longer nanotubes have larger surface area for load transfer. Also, largerdiameter threads can be spun from long CNTs, which would be beneficial in certain applications. However, synthesis of long and spinnable CNT arrays is complicated and spinning CNT threads from them a challenging task. There are different approaches for producing nanotube threads or yarns such as coagulation spinning of singlea)
Address all correspondence to this author. e-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/jmr.2010.91 J. Mater. Res., Vol. 26, No. 5, Mar 14, 2011
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wall CNTs and of MWNTs from a polymer solution,13–15 gas phase spinning of SWNTs and MWNTs from reaction furnace,4,16,17 and spinning directly from aligned MWNTs grown on flat substrates.18 All the aforementioned references are about spinning threads from short CNT arrays (less than 600 lm). Zhang et al. rep
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