Abstract
By using alcohol as carbon source molecules, high-purity single-walled carbon nanotubes are grown by the catalytic CVD process at low-temperature. The proposed alcohol CCVD method demonstrates its excellence in high yield production of SWNTs when Fe/Co supporting USY-zeolite powder is employed as a catalyst. At an optimum CVD condition, the SWNT yield of more than 800 wt % is achieved over the weight of the catalytic metal. In addition to the advantages in mass production, this method is also suitable for the direct synthesis of high-quality SWNTs on Si and quartz substrates when combined with a dip-coat technique to mount catalytic metals on the surface of substrates. This method allows an easy and costless loading of catalytic metals without the need of any support or under-layer materials that are required in previous studies. Finally, the result of molecular dynamics simulation for the SWNT growth process is demonstrated to obtain a fundamental insight of initial growth mechanism on the catalytic particles.
