One Step Fabrication of Aligned Carbon Nanotube Sheet via FC-CVD Technique

Abstract

The rising need for lightweight and strong mechanical structures has contributed significantly towards the development of CNT macrostructures; however, the interplay of parameters and their discontinuous synthesis have obstructed their delivery to commercial level. Herein, floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition technique (FC-CVD) has been employed for the fabrication of 90 cm long CNT sheet via continuous production of CNT aerogel. High degree of graphitization, thermal stability and purity have been indicated by Raman spectroscopy ( $I_G/I_D=10.03$ ), thermogravimetric analysis, and SEM studies. Continuous winding of CNT aerogel has increased the alignment into the sample which resulted into high electrical conductivity value of 21400 S/m. Furthermore, the alignment has been quantified by calculating optical anisotropic ratio ${I_G}^{‖}/{I_G}^{\perp }$ via polarized Raman technique and conductivity anisotropic ratio ${\kappa }^{‖}/{\kappa }^{\perp }$ which were calculated to be 4.63 and 3.4, respectively, and show reasonable agreement. These findings indicate that a well correlation of synthesis parameters results in highly aligned CNT sheet structure in a single step.