Literature on Carbon Nanotube Research
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Literature Review
I have hijacked this page to write down my views on the literature on Carbon Nanotube (CNT) growths and processing, a procedure that should give us the cable/ribbon we desire for the space elevator. I will try to put as much information as possible here. If anyone has something to add, please do not hesitate!
Direct mechanical measurement of the tensile strength and elastic modulus of multiwalled carbon nanotubes
B. G. Demczyk et al., Materials and Engineering, A334, 173-178, 2002
The paper by Demczyk et al. (2002) is the basic reference for the
experimental determination of the tensile strengths of individual
Multi-wall nanotube (MWNT) fibers. The experiments are performed with
a microfabricated piezo-electric device. On this device CNTs in the
length range of tens of microns are mounted. The tensile measurements
are obseverd by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and
videotaped. Measurements of the tensile strength (tension vs. strain) were
performed as well as Young modulus and bending stiffness. Breaking
tension is reached for the SWNT at 150GP and between 3.5% and 5% of
strain. During the measurements 'telescoping' extension of the MWNTs
is observed, indicating that single-wall nanotubes (SWNT) could be
even stronger. However, 150GPa remains the value for the tensile
strength that was experimentally observed for carbon nanotubes.
Multifunctional Carbon Nanotube Yarns by Downsizing an Ancient Technology
M. Zhang, K. R. Atkinson, and R. H. Baughman, Science, 306, 1358-1361, 2004
In the research article by M. Zhang et al. (2004) the procedure of
spinning long yarns from forests of MWNTs is described in detail. The
maximum breaking strength achieved is only 0.46 GPa based on the
30micron-long CNTs. The initial CNT forest is grown by chemical vapour
deposition (CNT) on a catalytic substrate, as usual. A very intersting
formula for the tensile strength of a yarn relative to the tensile
strength of the fibers (in our case the MWNTs) is given:
where alpha is the helix angle of the spun yarn, i.e. fiber direction relative to yarn axis. The constant k=sqrt(dQ/mu)/3L is given by the fiber diameter d=1nm, the fiber migration length Q (distance along the yartn over which a fiber shifts from the yarn surface to the deep interior and back again), the mu=0.13 is the friction coefficient of CNTs (the friction coefficent is the ratio of maximum along-fiber force divided by lateral force pressing the fibers together), L=30micron is the fiber length.
In the paper interesting transmission electron microscope (TEM) pictures are shown, which give insight into how the yarn is assembled from the CNT forest. The authors describe other characteristics of the yarn, like how knots can be introduced and how the yarn performs when knitted, apparently in preparation for application in the textile industry.
Ultra-high-yield growth of vertical single-walled carbon nanotubes: Hidden roles of hydrogen and oxygen
G. Zhang et al.,PNAS, 102, no. 45, 16141-16145, 2005
Important aspects of the production of CNTs that are suitable for the SE is the efficiency of the growth and the purity (i.e. lack of embedded amorphous carbon and imperfections in the Carbon bounds in the CNT walls). In their article G. Zhang et al. go into detail about the roles of oxygen and hydrogen during the chemical vapour deposition (CVD) growth of CNT forests from hydrocarbon sources on catalytic substrates. In earlier publications the role of oxygen was believed to be to remove amorphous carbon by oxidation into CO. The authors show, however, that, at least for this CNT growth technique, oxygen is important, because it removes hydrogen from the reaction. Hydrogen has apparently a very detrimental effect on the growth of CNTs, it even destroys existing CNTs as shown in the paper. Since hydrogen radicals are released during the dissociation of the hydrocarbon source compount, it is important to have a removal mechanism. Oxygen provides this mechanism, because its chemical affinity towards hydrogen is bigger than towards carbon.
In summary, if you want to efficiently grow pure CNT forests on a catalyst substrate from a hydrocarbon CVD reaction, you need a few percent oxygen in the source gas mixture. An additional interesting information in the paper is that you can design the places on the substrate, on which CNTs grow by placing the the catalyst only in certain areas of the substrate using lithography. In this way you can grow grids and ribbons. Figures are shown in the paper.
In the paper no information is given on the reason why the CNT growth stops at some point. The growth rate is given with 1 micron per minute. Of course for us it would be interesting to eliminate the mechanism that stops the growth so we could grow infinitely long CNTs.
High-Performance Carbon Nanotube Fiber
K. Koziol et al., Science, 318, 1892, 2007.
The paper "High-Performance Carbon Nanotube Fiber" by K. Koziol et al. is a research paper on the production of macroscopic fibers out of an aerogel (low-density, porous, solid material) of SWNT and MWNT that has been formed by carbon vapor deposition. They present an analysis of the mechanical performance figures (tensile strength and stiffness) of their samples. The samples are fibers of 1, 2, and 20mm length and have been extracted from the aerogel with high winding rates (20 metres per minute). Indeed higher winding rates appear to be desirable, but the authors have not been able to achieve higher values as the limit of extraction speed from the aerogel was reached, and higher speeds led to breakage of the aerogel.
They show in their results plot (Figure 3A) that typically the fibers split in two performance classes: low-performance fibers with a few GPa and high-performance fibers with around 6.5 GPa. It should be noted that all tensile strengths are given in the paper as GPa/SG, where SG is the specific gravity, which is the density of the material divided by the density of water. Normally SG was around 1 for most samples discussed in the paper. The two performance classes have been interpreted by the authors as the typical result of the process of producing high-strength fibers: since fibers break at the weakest point, you will find some fibers in the sample, which have no weak point, and some, which have one or more, provided the length of the fibers is in the order of the frequency of occurrence of weak points. This can be seen by the fact that for the 20mm fibers there are no high-performance fibers left, as the likelihood to encounter a weak point on a 20mm long fiber is 20 times higher than encountering one on a 1mm long fiber.
As a conclusion the paper is bad news for the SE, since the difficulty of producing a flawless composite with a length of 100,000km and a tensile strength of better than 3GPa using the proposed method is enormous. This comes back to the ribbon design proposed on the Wiki: using just cm-long fibers and interconnect them with load-bearing structures (perhaps also CNT threads). Now we have shifted the problem from finding a strong enough material to finding a process that produces the required interwoven ribbon. In my opinion the race to come up with a fiber of better than Kevlar is still open.
