Abstract
Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs) - also called CNT forests - are attractive for use in battery electrodes, capacitive sensors, thermal interface materials, and many other applications. However, for practical use in most cases, the CNT forest must be dense and have mechanically robust, low-resistance electrical contact with the substrate. Fulfilling those requirements is often challenging, particularly when copper is used as the substrate material. Herein, we report production of tall (270 μm maximum height) CNT forests on copper foils, by chemical vapor deposition by combining a supported catalyst structure with gaseous carbon preconditioning of the catalyst prior to film dewetting and annealing. Incorporation of tungsten in the catalyst support prevents diffusion of the iron catalyst into the underlying copper and promotes the formation of a high density population of catalyst particles. We find that the electrical resistance of the CNT forest scales with height, and correlated with X-ray scattering measurements of CNT density.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 77-83 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | ACS Applied Nano Materials |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 24 2020 |
Funding
Financial support was provided by the MIT Energy Initiative Seed Fund, the MIT-Skoltech Next Generation Program, Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-16-1-0011), and the NASA Space Technology Research Institute (STRI) for Ultra-Strong Composites by Computational Design (US-COMP, Grant NNX17AJ32G), B.R.L. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant 1122374. This work made use of the MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities at MIT (supported by the National Science Foundation under award number DMR-1419807), the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and MIT.nano.
Keywords
- carbon nanotubes
- chemical vapor deposition
- conductive, electrode
- nucleation
- resistance
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Materials Science