CNTBUS · In-situ fabrication of carbon nanotubes and bulk structures of designed configuration

In-situ fabrication of carbon nanotubes and bulk structures of designed configuration

The project aims to develop and understand a new approach of directly in situ fabricate carbon nanotube (CNT) bulk structures with designed configurations, which is still a very challenging but rewarding problem. The main thrust is to utilize nanoparticles to tunnel carbonaceous fibres derived from electrospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fibres to in situ form CNTs. The art of in situ producing CNTs from carbonaceous fibres may be used in current carbon fibre production to harvest CNTs ropes rather than carbon fibres. The derivation of this work is to revolutionise the current carbon fibre fabrication industry by incorporating some metal nanoparticles to in situ transform fibres into ultra-strength, ultra-length CNTs, which are expected to be the strongest material which could be produced in the future. Over the past year of research, the researcher worked as a research fellow with a fixed contract. He was asked to behave as a normal staff tasked with various obligations. No any unexpected outcome has happened. Amongst all tasks involved in this project, the most important one was to produce CNTs by metal nanoparticles tunnelling inside carbon fibres. For this, one has to understand the mechanism of the transformation of carbon fibres to CNTs, which was observed by the fellow previously. Over the past one year, the fellow tried to elucidate the formation process of such CNTs by annealing carbon fibres coated with transmit metals and electrospun PAN fibres doped with nickel nanoparticles. The preliminary results are that a loose core inside the carbon fibres is necessary which guides the traveling of metal nanoparticles, and that the graphene layers of CNTs are stacked up due to the catalysing of metal particles and thus a maxima thickness of produced CNTs exists as shown in Fig.1. But the details of how the graphene layers are stacked so orderly is still unclear. We hope in the future by using in situ TEM/HRTEM techniques to understand the process completely. Based on the current work and our previous research, we believe that the process proposed here is very likely to have an impact on the relevant industry (such as Harper International). Further research support in this field is undoubtedly necessary if some more parameters are made clear, a powerful patent may be made. As the phase transformation of carbon material is complex, tests on diamond to graphite onions are also researched. Upon heating up, diamond nanoparticles are converted to nano hollow graphite spheres that are made of graphene layers as shown in Fig.2. This result may be important in energy storage and drug delivery.

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